The Central Laboratory - Max Jacob

The Central Laboratory by Max Jacob, translated by Alexander Dickow / ISBN 9781939663801 / 320-page paperback with flaps from Wakefield Press *** The first English translation of the Cubist poet’s most important collection of verse poems―a wild grab bag of contradictory styles When Max Jacob published The Central Laboratory in 1921, Parisian Dada had just officially come to an end and Surrealism was yet to be born. The poetic scene in Paris was between definitions, and Jacob embodied that moment. The Central Laboratory is distinctly modern, yet utterly discordant with anything else that had been published before: a grab bag of popular genres, operettas, Breton folk song, nonsense poetry, nursery rhyme, 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