Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com, where the poetry arrives in multiple languages and the existential stakes are, conservatively, nuclear.
Mara: Today we’re covering work by Adam Donaldson Powell — French-language poetic fragments that move through identity, race, and social fracture, and then a pair of sprawling speculative poem cycles that operate on an entirely different scale.
Pip: Let’s start with the French-language work.
Fairy Tales and Social Fragments in French
Mara: The anchor here is “Huit Contes de Fees,” a collection framed in the spirit of Perrault and Voltaire — but the fairy tales it tells are contemporary, and they cut. The opening poem sets the scene directly: a bus ride, a breakdown of the air conditioning, and then a slur that paradoxically orients the narrator.
Pip: Right — the poem turns on that moment. The speaker is lost, panicked, about to get off the bus, and then someone whispers a racial epithet, and suddenly he knows exactly where he is. Location confirmed via hatred.
Mara: The poem reads: “j’ai souri comme une vieille mouche dans une nouvelle toilette parce que soudain, je savais exactement ou j’etais.” So the smile is the punchline — grim, knowing, earned.
Pip: What makes it land is the prose note that follows. The speaker grew up in Spain and the United States, describes his skin tone as “more mixed than Black,” and recalls being stopped constantly and asked what was wrong with him for not fitting the expected mold.
Mara: That context reframes the whole poem. The slur isn’t just an insult — it’s a crude social GPS, and the speaker’s wry acceptance of it is both survival and critique.
Mara: The rest of “Huit Contes de Fees” moves through eight numbered poems and several prose pieces. “La Marelle” follows a child navigating a hopscotch board that keeps colliding with predators, soldiers, and Daesh — childhood and geopolitics on the same pavement.
Pip: “Privileges” lands its reversal quietly: the narrator, called a bastard for not knowing his father, realizes at the end he has two mothers, and the classmate calling him mixed-race is the one with the deficit of love.
Mara: “Le Hijab,” “Question de Couleur,” “Les Ennuis,” “Les Mendiants,” and “Bolero Moderne” each take a different child’s perspective — a Muslim girl dreaming of burning her hijab, a Vietnamese boy invisible to classmates who claim not to see race, a kindergartner arrested for saying he wants to be a soldier for ISIS, a boy whose act of charity is rejected with fury.
Pip: Eight poems, eight children, eight different angles on what Europe actually asks of people who don’t fit the default.
Mara: The standalone post “Putain” also belongs here — it’s the Titaina sequence in French, a Tahitian woman confronting colonial damage, ecological ruin, and domestic violence through the metaphor of feral dogs in the slums of Papeete.
Pip: From Paris schoolyards to Polynesian trottoirs — the geography shifts but the question doesn’t: who gets to belong, and at what cost?
Mara: That question of belonging at civilizational scale is exactly where the next segment goes.
When the Eagle and the Bear Speak After the Bomb
Mara: “Three Blockbuster Poem Cycles” gathers three long works. The centerpiece is “The Left and the Right Hands of God,” a co-written epic structured as a post-nuclear dialogue between an American bald eagle named Transforma and a Russian bear named Vrebatima.
Pip: A psychedelic Cold War autopsy, written in English, Russian, and German simultaneously.
Mara: The poem announces its stakes early. Transforma says: “The Armageddon was inevitable … We needed it, and so we created it. But it is only illusion … Только иллюзия.” So the destruction isn’t accidental — it’s choreographed, and both speakers know it.
Pip: Which is the actual argument of the poem. The superpowers didn’t stumble into catastrophe; they contracted it. The Cold War was a managed performance, and what came after was the loss of even that structure.
Mara: Vrebatima’s voice pushes harder — nihilist, multilingual, invoking Nietzsche, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Dhammapada in the same breath. The poem is also the introduction to a sci-fi novel called “The Tunnel at the End of Time,” so the apocalypse here is both literary and speculative scaffolding.
Pip: The collection also includes “Whispers,” co-written with Diane Oatley — a seven-part dialogue for two voices that premiered in Kathmandu in 2006, operating at the scale of interior collapse rather than geopolitical wreckage.
Mara: And the “Putain” / “Whore” sequence appears here in both French and English — the same Titaina, the same dogs, the same defiance, now bilingual and placed alongside the epic work as a counterweight: intimate fury next to cosmic nihilism.
Pip: From the schoolyard to the end of the world — and somehow the same wound runs through all of it.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the question of who gets to name reality — and who survives the naming.
Pip: Next time, more from osoparavos.com — same questions, probably louder.
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