Artwork by Toyen
Foreword by Mary Ann Caws
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Interested reviewers: Email editor [at] blacksunlit [dot] com for an advance review copy.
LUNAR RING FINGER is a festival of seismic language that beckons the unbound horizon of imagination against the calamitous azure of a hyper-mediated world. In her final standalone book of poetry, and here her first to be translated into English, Annie Le Brun erodes the petrification of haunting catastrophe with lovestruck insurgency and supple shifts of perception: revealing the circumstance of our political and environmental annihilation not as the anxious surrender of life but the urgent impetus to recuperate those inner forces of nature by which it is most yearningly, eruptively lived. Resuscitating the primordial imperative of French Surrealism, Lunar Ring Finger inhabits the psychic forests of childhood—in “the absence of any known restrictions,” as André Breton writes—and manifests a possible future out of visceral marvelousness. Translated by Marine Cornuet and accompanied with prefatory remarks from renowned scholar Mary Ann Caws, this edition also includes the collaborative drawings by Toyen originally paired in the Éditions Maintenant publication.
Preorders for Lunar Ring Finger are now available at Asterism Books.
Advance praise for Lunar Ring Finger
“Annie Le Brun, in her first volume of poetry via English, has taken the spectacular scent of a haunting raccoon always ingesting fabulous morsels of language. Such raccoons ignited in the realm of Le Brun’s living lingual creation are not unlike ‘things, wandering in the desert of their erosion.’”
—Will Alexander, author of Aunonomic Reasoning
“In Lunar Ring Finger, Annie Le Brun’s anarchic spirit and ‘cannibal confidence’ find their match in Marine Cornuet’s sly translation. Wrecked with chaos and refraction, these poems remind us that in the right hands Surrealism takes aim not just at the surface of consensual reality but at the tethers that pretend to lead us back. The real disobedience is in how the words themselves climb ‘haphazardly onto the backs of things’ and make us re-describe their shapes. But what I love most about this book is how the fiction of human dominion over the rest of existence falls to pieces beneath the muscled weight of evidence to the contrary, again and again, all the way to the banger of a last line.”
—Anna Moschovakis, translator of At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
“Annie Le Brun pulls on the threads of the fabric of consciousness, teasing it, testing to see how hard she can pull before it snaps, the death of which then ‘has an organdy languor.’ Half dance at the ornate gates of an abandoned logic, half augury for the sensation of fallout once said logic has finally done us in, yet all Le Brun, and Cornuet’s siren of a translation trapezes the Surrealist poet’s infatuation with paradox, her tendency toward internal contradiction, for never sitting still. Lovers of the image behind the word behind the mind—feast.”
—Aiden Farrell, translator of The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes
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