Jean Sénac’s poetry sits at a charged crossroads: French and Algerian, erotic and political, intimate and insurgent.

Dérisions et Vertige belongs to the later arc of his work, where lyric intensity and formal sharpness meet a life lived in public fracture — decolonisation, exile, desire, language, nationhood, all pressing against one another.

This is not polite poetry, nor safely museum-kept francophone verse. Sénac writes with heat, abrasion, and tenderness, trying to make a language equal to contradiction: beauty without innocence, identity without purity, love without shelter. A serious copy for readers of twentieth-century poetry who like their literature lit from inside by risk. 

French-language Actes Sud edition from 1983. Some marginalia in black ink pen, otherwise in great condition.