Last Words

LAST WORDS (Last Words)  is an artist’s book combining a sound piece with the last words of prisoners sentenced to death, collected just before the start of the execution procedure  – and made public by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on its website,  To date,  since the resumption of capital executions  on 7 December 1982 in Texas, 527 inmates have been put to death by lethal injection.
Vanessa PLACE  speaks the last words of the condemned, collected just before the start of the execution procedure, and made public by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on its website, as are the portraits of the executed gathered here in the book. To date, 527 inmates have been put to death in Texas since 1982. All by lethal injection.

“It would be inappropriate to hear in this reading any kind of music, or even a sombre sound poetry. One would have to ask Vanessa Place, an American poet and also a lawyer, what she came looking for in these last confessions of those sentenced to death by Texan justice since the resumption of capital executions in December 1982 – a poetic use of testimony, as Charles Reznikoff did before her, perhaps; an inspiration that digs into the blackest depths of the human – whether the human in question be judge, murderer or even (who knows?) innocent – perhaps also, in the manner of Kathy Acker, Peter Sotos or Dennis Cooper (whose striking Jerk was published by Dis Voir in the same series.)
These “sleepers” whom we find photographed in the book – images and words come from the archives of the Texas Criminal Justice website – crowd against one another: six portraits per page, and Last Words has sixty of them. Since she cannot quote each of these three hundred and sixty condemned, Place forbids us, in her own way, from linking, as in a children’s game, a given face to the words it may have spoken, just as she has refrained from attaching to a given utterance the crime that will have silenced it.
In a monotone voice, even a withdrawn one, she then tells off a rosary – God and his ambassadors are often in question here – of apologies, regrets and words of love, of forgotten details and of the hopes that may be attached to them (of going “home”, of being welcomed “into heaven”, of believing that the death about to be injected into you is a kind of rebirth…), of tributes and dedications, of thanks (more alone than it would be possible to be in the middle of the desert, religion would still manage to guide you), and finally of farewells – the most terrible perhaps being this “No last statement, no.”
Poignant, obviously. Delivered under a leaden sky, the administrative thing catches the last words of its condemned and makes them public: Vanessa Place, for her part, recites and illustrates today what Michel Foucault once wrote: “At the heart of madness, delirium takes on a new meaning.” Yet perhaps it is not this “new meaning” that strikes most here.  ” Guillaume Belhomme © Le son du grisli

Vanessa PLACE (born in 1968 in Stratford, lives and works between Los Angeles and New York) is an American writer and performer. The first poet to have taken part in the Whitney Museum Biennial in New York, she has notably given performances at PS1, New York and at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. She  is also a critic and criminal defence lawyer.

Format	165 x 215 mm
Pages	64
Illustrations	60 color
Binding	paperback
ISBN	978-2-914563-77-2