Ring of Dust

A poem sequence that embraces the ruptures a lyrical turn makes possible.

In Ring of Dust, 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.

Louise Marois is an acclaimed writer and artist born in Montreal in 1960. Recognized for her poetic works many times over, her first collection of poetry received the Jacqueline-Déry-Mochon prize and she has twice been a finalist for the Governor General Literary Award. She lives and works in Sherbrooke, Quebec, where she dedicates her time to writing and artmaking.

Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator. They are the author of the hybrid poetry collection Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for, among others, the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General Literary Awards. Bradford’s first translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), received the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Award for Translation. Their most recent book of poetry, Bottom Rail on Top, was a Raymond Souster Award finalist. Bradford lives and works in Tio’tia: ke (Montreal) on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá?ka Nation.