Nothing At All Paperback by Olivia Tapiero

Product Details

• Publisher: Strange Light (2026-03-17)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 144 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780771036286
• Item Weight: 153.09 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

An atmospheric rumination on gendered violence, cosmic collapse, and colonialism, from acclaimed author Olivia Tapiero, finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Lambda Literary Awards, and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Available for the first time in English, with an all-new foreword by Anne Boyer.

“I’m trying to find out whose ghost I am.”

From deep inside a black hole comes Nothing At All—a space where form, genre, gender, and being collapse. In poetic, essayistic fragments overflowing with apocalyptic beauty, Olivia Tapiero explores how history, illness, and desire intertwine amid personal and collective suffering: the betrayal of a tainted blood transfusion and its ramifications throughout the family tree; the brutality of colonialism and the cold comfort of diaspora in its aftermath; the wormholes opened by acts of violence across space and time.

But even as decay and perversion manifest at every stop from the bottom of the ocean to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, Tapiero resists letting this become a mere document of misery. Implicit in her vivid, visceral imagery of disintegration is the opportunity for renewal and rebirth—a balm for our wounded era, the hope amid ruin that something can come from nothing.

About the Author

OLIVIA TAPIERO is a writer, translator, and musician. She is the author of Les murs (VLB éditeur, 2009, Robert-Cliche Award, Prix Senghor finalist), Espaces (Éditions XYZ, 2012), Chairs (Groupe Nota Bene, 2019), Phototaxie / Phototaxis (Nightboat Books, 2017 / 2021, Lambda Literary Awards finalist), Rien du tout (Mémoire d'Encrier, 2021, Grand Prix du livre de Montréal Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Awards finalist), and Un carré de poussière (Les éditions de la Rue Dorion, 2025). She is editor-in-chief for the literary magazine Moebius, and has contributed poems and essays to various publications in Canada, France, and Korea. She has also translated works of contemporary authors such as Roxane Gay, Anne Boyer, and Billy-Ray Belcourt. She lives between Montreal and Marseille.

KIT SCHLUTER is a poet-translator and bookmaker living in Mexico City. His poetry & stories have appeared in Boston Review, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail,Folder, Hyperallergic, and in the chapbooks Inclusivity Blueprint, Journals, Translations of Forgetting, Without is a Part of Origin, and the newly released collections of stories and drawings, 5 Cartoons/5 caricaturas (tr. Mariana Rodríguez, Juan Malasuerte Editores) and The Good in Having a Nuclear Family (Despite Editions). He is recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in translation, a Glascock Prize, and a “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize, and holds an MFA in poetry from Brown University.