Lunar Ring Finger by Annie Le Brun, trans. from the French by Marine Cornuet

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.

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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

Annie Le Brun (1942–2024) was a French poet, essayist, critic, and member of the Paris Surrealists from 1963 until the group’s disbanding in 1969. She published five of her seven poetry collections between 1972 and 1977 with Éditions Maintenant, a small press she co-founded with Radovan Ivšić, Toyen, and George Goldfayn. After 1977, Le Brun turned her focus toward critical writing, authoring polemic essays against French neofeminism, a poetic study of the gothic tradition, an exegesis of the Marquis de Sade’s work, as well as essays on André Breton, Aimé Césaire, and Alfred Jarry, among others. From 1980 onward, she developed a critical analysis of beauty, the art market, the status of images in contemporary society, and realism. Lunar Ring Finger is Le Brun’s first book of poetry and third to be translated into English after Sade: A Sudden Abyss (trans. Camille Naish, City Lights, 1990) and The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm (trans. Jon E. Graham, Inner Traditions, 2008).

Toyen (1902–1980) was a painter and drafter involved with the Czech avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1920s, they co-founded the “artificialist movement” with poet and painter Jindřich Štyrský, declaring “the identification of the painter with the poet.” Toyen’s interest in erotica and the interplay between desire, poetry, and images led them to identify with the Surrealist movement. In 1934, they co-founded the Czech Surrealist group and continued their artistic practice throughout World War II, while hiding Jewish poet and artist Jindřich Heisler during the Nazi occupation. Toyen moved to France in 1948, joined André Breton and the French Surrealists, and continued their exploration of desire, gender, and representation in painting and in life.

Marine Cornuet is a translator, poet, and editor. Her translations include Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Gréki (Pinsapo Press and Lost & Found, 2024) and Cloche pelerine by Kaveh Akbar (Le Castor Astral, 2024). She is an editor and collective member at Pinsapo Press and Ugly Duckling Presse.

Mary Ann Caws is a writer, translator, art historian, and literary critic who has written widely on twentieth-century avant-garde poetry and art. She is the author of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism (Reaktion Books, 2019), Surprised in Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (MIT Press, 1997), among many others. She has translated works by Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, René Char, and Alice Paalen Rahon, written biographies of Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Mina Loy, and Salvador Dalí, and edited numerous anthologies, including The Milk Bowl of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writings (New Directions, 2018) and The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (Yale University Press, 2004).

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