The Escapades

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. || "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. 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. 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 || "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 || "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 || Translation. French Literature. Poetry. Mythology.