2025
168 pages
ISBN: 9798991501149
parution: 15.09.2025
traduction (Un domaine des corpuscules): Aditi Machado
A stunning work of prose poetry from award-winning Swiss poet Baptiste Gaillard, In the Realm of Motes is a key ecopoetic text that celebrates the infinitesimal and the ephemeral in their entropic yet orchestral movements of aggregration, fragmentation, and mutation. Both Gaillard’s language and what these prose poems point to break apart, absorb, and reconstitute a unique space that is both easily comprehended and entirely strange. At one moment we’re reading about a lake or a forest and the next our deepest meditations and alarms. These short prose poems must be read to understand the lower layer connecting us and our surroundings
Gaillard’s journey through an “empire of water-logged objects” and labyrinths of dust illuminates “dazzling zones of unprecedented shapes,” blooming from infra-worlds within and beyond the human present: “what lives in water becomes water.” In the Realm of Motes is a tour de force celebration, amid chaos and turmoil, of matter’s potential for endlessly new beginnings.
—Jonathan Skinner, tk
In a Realm of Motes sediments the prose poem with its substances and strata that comprise our beautiful world. Aditi Machado’s translations of Baptiste Gaillard’s poems are luminously textured and tender—a pure delight in the vibrancy of eco-materialism—with each line bringing to the surface Gaillard’s terrestrial dramas of guano on stones and on windows, insects caught in webs, and clumps of hair in u-bend pipes. Here are poems that find awe in the roughness of ecological forms, in the slimy, vaporous, decomposing sludge from which all creative energies are renewed!
—Orchid Tierney, author of this abattoir is a college
Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes is a startling suite of poems. Aditi Machado’s translation makes accessible Gaillard’s poetics, which “teeters constantly between impasse and epiphany” through the legibility of decay, of rot, of the immaculate infiltration of water. In the Realm of Motes gives language to the insurgency of a system at work; “a series of wastelands organizes itself under a regime of drought.” The lyric is tidal, the movement is everywhere.
—C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking
Extrait du texte dans la revue Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation (University of Iowa).
Extrait du texte sur le site European Literature Network