Ring of Dust by Louise Marois

In Ring of Dust, veteran Quebec poet Louise Marois delights in poetic feints, temporal leaps, asides, tangents, sleights of hand, call-backs and echoes. This ambitious collection of sequences populates plural dialogues between then and now, family and entourage, lover and nature, mother and death, work-person and artist, fables and confidences, limits and new reaches, home and escape, city and field, queer life and a blood red world. It’s a proposition that enters the mess of memory in hopes of reconciling, one disharmony at a time, the many voices who inhabit what keepsakes remain. This book is past and present at war with each other; it’s also the future emerging from the page-by-page bout, all born anew in an exuberant translation by D.M. Bradford.

Praise for Ring of Dust

“Bradford’s translation of Marois’s poetry is confident and fluid, carrying the sensuality, force, and verve of the original into a new realm. Skillful work.” — Annick MacAskill, author of Votive and Shadow Blight

“Imagine Julia Kristeva, Jenny Holzer, and Sappho have tea together in an alternate universe. Erín Moure joins them. Patti Smith takes notes. Ring of Dust reads like the result of this imaginary social interaction, burgeoning with queer longing, wit, wordplay, sensuosity, and delightfully audacious footnotes. D.M. Bradford’s deft translation of Louise Marois’s poetry takes the reader on a tour through the welcome blaze of emotional and intellectual discovery, navigating a world where ‘the knowing eye is a merciless one.’ Spare, imagistic, frisky, and elegiacal, this is a book I will read again and again.” —Triny Finlay, author of Myself A Paperclip