Letter to Liri

by Pierre Gervois

Artist’s Statement:

My childhood in Paris during the 1980s has exposed me to a constant flow of press articles about the Cold War and the complex relations with the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries, and the West. I was avidly reading political magazines and was passionate about geopolitics. In 2024, I randomly found an obscure 1960 book by Enver Hoxha titled "Albania Challenges Khrushchev Revisionism". Using techniques of documentary poetry, this poem contains, verbatim, the content of a political reprimand letter dated June 23, 1960, sent by the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha to Liri Belishova, a member of the Party of Labour of Albania. I was intrigued by this historic document about a minuscule detail of history, long forgotten, that no historian will probably ever read or comment on again due to its extreme obscurity. I strongly felt the humiliation that this Albanian female politician should have experienced by reading this letter from her leader, for not having been Marxist-Leninist enough. I also felt it was the duty of a poet to show that even a totally obscure historical and political document might have poetic qualities. 

BIO: Pierre Gervois (b. 1969) is a French-born American poet and conceptual, text-based artist living and working in New York City. His works are noted for their unsettling atmosphere and emotionless examination of power relations in everyday life. With a clinical, report-like style that withholds moral commentary, he portrays the disillusioned American middle class, struggling with the broken promise of social mobility. He first published his poems in 2021 on the blockchain as digital poetry, and was represented by the VERSEverse digital poetry gallery. Gervois’s poems were published in The Rattle poetry magazine in 2023 and in the Hong Kong publication 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine in 2025. X account: @pgervois