The Central Laboratory

The Central Laboratory is a collection of verse poems by Max Jacob, published in 1921. It is a wild grab bag of contradictory styles, embodying the moment between definitions in Parisian poetry. Jacob's art of mixed signals and mocked allegory formulates a camp sensibility, "queering" literary style. The book remains peculiar and lost in the shadow of Jacob's more famous book of prose poems, The Dice Cup.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 360 pages
Publication date: 24 September 2022
Publisher: Wakefield Press

When Max Jacob released The Central Laboratory in 1921, Parisian Dada had just officially concluded, and Surrealism had yet to emerge. The poetic scene in Paris was in a state of flux, and Jacob embodied that moment. The Central Laboratory is distinctly modern, yet utterly discordant with anything that had been published before: a grab bag of popular genres, operettas, Breton folk songs, nonsense poetry, nursery rhymes, doggerel, parody, and puns in which sound often trumps sense, and Jacob changes register on a dime. Employing Symbolist obscure reference, Cubist fracturing of perspective, and Dadaist discontinuity, Jacob's art of mixed signals and mocked allegory formulates a camp sensibility, a "queering" of literary style as riddled with contradiction as Jacob himself had been in his lifetime. A century after its initial publication in French, the book remains utterly peculiar and lost for too long in the shadow of Jacob's more famous book of prose poems, The Dice Cup. Jacob himself said of The Central Laboratory: "it sums up 20 years and reflects 20 states of soul, often 20 styles either suffered or created by me."

Max Jacob (1876–1944) was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic. A key figure of bohemian Montmartre and the Cubist era, he rubbed shoulders with such figures as Apollinaire and Modigliani, and was a lifelong friend to Picasso, Gris, and Cocteau. Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he died in a deportation camp of pneumonia. Rosanna Warren's critically acclaimed biography of Jacob was published in 2020.

Weight: 499g
Dimension: 201 x 137 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781939663801