TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY JULIE CARR AND JENNIFER PAP

Translators’ Note: Faced with the desire, or with the ethical summons, to write about an alienating and often hidden place in society, Kaplan wrote L’excès-l’usine, a book-length poem that exposes what is unformed in the factory environment, and acknowledges the distance and separation that the environment creates between people and objects. Kaplan’s poetic voice moves and circulates through the factory with its heaps of wire, sheet metal, its assembly line rhythms, and its open yards. As such, she renders into poetry what is political life—the position of the workers in this factory and their isolation from the value of what they are producing. And yet, her poetry seems to discover and record a sharing of sense-perception across the community and space of the factory.