Know Thy Audience

Know Thy Audience, Nadia de Vries's third poetry collection, disavows the platitude from which it takes its name and makes the reader complicit in both her aggression and her submission, sparked by a history of domestic abuse that escapes all euphemism and metaphor - but not poetry altogether. Speaking-or rather, singing-as a 'battered woman' from a working-class neighborhood, De Vries' aphoristic writing belies a vengeful reversal of roles in which the author-and not her perpetrator-pulls the strings. Who is the victim in these poems? Can violence be redeemed through esthetic metamorphosis? Or can powerlessness only be transferred as fetish? Know Thy Audience investigates the extent to which a victim can share their wounds, and to what degree an audience can-sensibly, ethically-be burdened with painful knowledge.

About the Author :
Nadia de Vries is a poet, novelist, and critic based in Amsterdam. She writes in both English and Dutch, and has been translated into Polish, Russian, Romanian, and Latvian. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, Dark Hour (2018) and I Failed to Swoon (2021), and a novel, De Bakvis (2022). A section of her doctoral thesis was recently published by MIT. She has also appeared on platforms such as The Poetry Review, PROTOTYPE and Glamcult, been a recipient of the Passa Porta Residency in Brussels, the Dutch Young Art Critics Prize, and received support from the Dutch Foundation of Letters.

Review :
"Menace turned inside out! 'When I die I want to come back as a piercing sound / In the ear of every rapist.' Here is the poetry without the hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, but you know this book is brilliant, and you know you will live with these poems for the rest of your life once you have read them. I am a huge fan of Nadia de Vries, a poet wrangling suffering bodies on the map of a world we like to think we know, offering us no easy answers." CAConrad ----------"Know Thy Audience is a revelation, and confirms that De Vries is an extraordinarily significant, vital voice in English-language poetry." Ralf Webb ---------- "In her visceral and razor-sharp poems, Nadia de Vries navigates the circular relationship between perpetration and victimhood, assuaging the catharsis often seen as intrinsic to writing and opening up new paths to redemption." Hannah Pezzack ---------- "Nadia de Vries' poetry is as precise as a surgical tool and as turbulent and anarchic as blood gushing from a wound." Francesca Kritikos ---------- "Know Thy Audience tangles us into the ease with which we can be violated, into that very violence, and the frontlines of the war. 'How do you depict a stabbing motion in a poem?' Here's how." M.M. Garr ----------- "These tiny, curt and stark poems are anthems of empowerment for anyone who has ever had to claw their way out." Lucy K .Shaw