Je voudrais pas crever gathers Boris Vian’s late poems, published posthumously in 1962.

Known more broadly for his novels and jazz-inflected provocations, Vian’s poetry is sharper, stranger, and more stripped back. The title—“I Wouldn’t Want to Die”—sets the tone: defiance edged with fragility, absurdity threaded through dread.

These poems belong to mid-century French existential and avant-garde currents, but Vian resists solemnity. His language swerves between surreal play and lucid despair, often within the same stanza. It is compact, volatile writing—less manifesto than flare. For readers of postwar French literature, this is a small but resonant piece of that ecosystem.

Marked sadly, well loved. But extremely rare 1962 original, published in French.