The most important prosepoem collection of the 20th century available in a trade publication for the first timeMax Jacobs role in French modernity was essential and with this second volume of his work from Wakefield Press it can now be fully and properly assessed. First published in 1917 The Dice Cup stands alongside Baudelaires Paris Spleen Rimbauds Illuminations and Pierre Reverdys Prose Poems as one of the most important and foundational books of prose poetry. Jacob has been identified as a cubist poet but this collection and its shifting style escape any such easy definition dream accounts are rendered in playful prose that thumbs its nose at the fabular tradition of Baudelaire and Mallarm and the Romantic disorder of Rimbaud and subverts both poetic and narrative expectations in favor of dream logic allusion transformed autobiography and nonsensical parody. At once mystical and burlesque the prose poems of Dice Cup are consciously constructed yet as unstable and unfixed as both Jacobs personality and our own.Max Jacob 18761944 was a French poet painter writer and critic. A key figure of bohemian Montmartre and the Cubist era he rubbed shoulders with Apollinaire and Modigliani and was a lifelong friend to Picasso Gris and Cocteau. Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 he died in a deportation camp of pneumonia. Rosanna Warrens critically acclaimed biography of Jacob was published in 2020.