The Missing Pieces

The Missing Pieces is a list not only to be read an item at a time, but, as the very cover of the book itself might imply, to be viewed as a mishmash of things forgotten, and of things we need to dutifully remember.

Into a contemporary landscape of data mining and information fracking comes Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces, a beautifully absurd accumulation of useless numbers and gravid blankness…. Like history’s own compacted narrative, Lefebvre’s economy of restraint holds countless events suspended in a semicolon.

I can’t recommend it enough. The entries are short, tightly written fragments—a funny, absurd, poignant and melancholy gathering of things that once were, but are now gone.

The Missing Pieces has as much to do with presence as with absence, and this tells us something about the canon, and—forgive me—about ‘poetry in general.’ I mean that no equivalent list of artworks or gains or successes could be so powerful as The Missing Pieces.

Henri Lefebvre, born in 1959 in Salon-de-Provence, lives and works in Paris. He founded and directs Les Cahiers de la Seine, a publishing house devoted to contemporary poetry.Kate Zambreno, the author of two novels, O Fallen Angel and Green Girl and the work Heroines (Semiotext(e)), teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. She is at work on a series of books about time, memory, and the persistence of art, which includes Book of Mutter and the forthcoming Drifts.

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