Marie-Noëlle Agniau - The Escapades
Marie-Noëlle Agniau
The Escapades
Translated from French by
JESSE HOVER AMAR
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
144 pages
October 3, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-25-3
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
MARIE-NOËLLE AGNIAU is a poet, essayist, and educator. Since 2002 she has published more than thirty volumes of poetry, philosophy, and belles lettres, as well as collaborative work with visual artists. She is a familiar voice on the radio network RCF, where she presents poetic and philosophical programs. Agniau lives in Limousin, central France, with her husband, the writer Laurent Bourdelas.
JESSE HOVER AMAR is a scholar of Classical literature. He is interested in poetry which displays deep engagement with texts from the past, while asserting its modernity and uniqueness. In 2022, he served as guest editor for World Poetry Review. The Escapades is his first work as a translator.
PRESS
Marie-Noëlle Agniau
The Escapades
Translated from French by
JESSE HOVER AMAR
French poet Marie-Noëlle Agniau’s English-language debut is a surreal and haunting work of transfiguration and rupture inspired by Ovid’s Ocyrhoe.
The Escapades builds on the Greek myth of a woman transformed into a horse by the obscure machinations of the Fates to tell the story of a human soul, both man and woman, that wanders among animals and children, haunted by the loss of its name, body, and voice. Agniau’s eminently humane surrealism articulates questions of profound importance: the place of silence and speech, absence and love, in a troubled world.
"The vivid originality of Agniau’s thinking—eye-opening ideas and connections brought home through arresting imagery—is further enhanced by Amar’s astonishing ear. Off-rhymes, tight or cascading down the page, alliteration fused with assonance—’Even birth thirsts, blind, in salt’—create a pressurized weave that radiates insight. This first translation of Agniau’s work into English is a gift to the language and to its poetic possibilities.” —Cole Swensen
“In the background of Marie-Noëlle Agniau’s elemental The Escapades, both Ocyrhoe and Philomela blink up as two Greek figures robbed of speech—one by conversion into a horse and one by losing her tongue—while ‘the poem’ must sustain itself. This moving lyric sequence, lit by summer in the elastic days of Ordinary Time, brings a brilliant French poet to English-language readers at last.” —Susan Wheeler
“These are poems of erotic exaltation, of wind and the rush of rain driven forward. These are poems ‘on the offensive,’ escaping their own bounds before they begin, running downhill like flames (‘my tongue crackles like fire’). Mud stuck to its boots, the poem is ahead of itself, it has ‘come to speak to you of things that are not yet there.’ Poems as prophecy, then, calling for the release of our solitude that alone will save us from ourselves: ‘I am that mouth, and its hectic form.’ The tongue enthralled caresses the world, its birds, its children, its disordered landscapes. In Agniau’s Cavale, Amar’s Escapades, ‘speaking becomes the most beautiful human act’ for how it marks the persistence of desire while grieving our distance from all that we seek to touch, to know, and to be.” —Julie Carr
“Marie-Noëlle Agniau constructs a world of objects, of elements, of things; of beings which are distinct, certainly, but not set in any kind of hierarchy. A world from before reason, or alien to reason, in which the invisible cedes to the visible through the power of language.” —Jean-Louis Clarac
BIOS
MARIE-NOËLLE AGNIAU is a poet, essayist, and educator. Since 2002 she has published more than thirty volumes of poetry, philosophy, and belles lettres, as well as collaborative work with visual artists. She is a familiar voice on the radio network RCF, where she presents poetic and philosophical programs. Agniau lives in Limousin, central France, with her husband, the writer Laurent Bourdelas.
JESSE HOVER AMAR is a scholar of Classical literature. He is interested in poetry which displays deep engagement with texts from the past, while asserting its modernity and uniqueness. In 2022, he served as guest editor for World Poetry Review. The Escapades is his first work as a translator.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
144 pages
October 3, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-25-3
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
