4:48 Psychose

Somewhere between convulsive poetry and clinical despair, 4:48 Psychosis is a love song imbued with abysmal loneliness and pierced by a harsh light. Before disappearing, an anonymous figure addresses a prayer to the world, caught between rage and catalepsy. Rejecting a suffocating psychiatric rationality, she expresses her unhealed fracture, her thirst for life and truth, and her quest for the absolute and beauty. 
In contrast to this testamentary text, Skin, one of Sarah Kane’s earliest works, reveals the most visceral violence at its source.

First published by L’Arche in 2001, 4:48 Psychosis is a poem that has become iconic. This new translation by Vanasay Khamphommala conveys the extraordinary force of Sarah Kane’s text, its transformative power that, by challenging language and the body, breaks down the boundaries of gendered imaginaries and eroticism.