In this classic collection of prose poems, French poet Charles Baudelaire explores hypocrisy, madness, and biting criticism of nineteenth-century elites, diving without hesitation into the murkiest of human waters. Baudelaire was attracted to dirt and degradation, to the seamier side of life, the negative aspects of experience. Here is the poet as garbage collector, or perhaps garbage sifter, reclaiming value from that which society rejects, recycling worth in what has been thrown away. And in the prose poems there are tarnished gems aplenty.

Two years after Baudelaire's death, his prose poems were first published in their entirety under the title "Petits Poèmes en prose" (Short Prose Poems) in Collected Works. They are also known as "Le Spleen de Paris," which James Roderick Burns has translated as "Paris Bile." "Always be a poet," Baudelaire once declared, "even in prose," and his prose poems have the same evocative phrasings as his tightly structured poetry. He described his prose poetry as "a screw or a kaleidoscope," honing in on a miniature detail and then expanding out on the panorama of life. He was unconcerned about the poems' narrative cohesion and refused to "tie the recalcitrant will to the unending thread of a superfluous plot."

The new translation into English by James Roderick Burns captures all the decadence of the original, while making it accessible to today's twenty-first century readers.