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Beyond Gestures

Being Belgian and writing in French, the Piqueray twins were influenced by Surrealism, as seen in the paintings of René Magritte and Paul Delvaux, images of dreamlike disjunction that, according to Surrealism’s founder, Andre Breton, represented the Absolute. The real truth was to be found in the uncanny and its twin sister, eroticism. The Piqueray brothers were not, however, programmatic, as Breton proved to be. In their poem, “Light,” dedicated to their Jewish sisters and brothers, we are touched by history: “Yes, the ancestors / Yes, the cantor / Yes, the blood / In the tub / Yes, the glass of red wine / Spilled / on the white tablecloth.”  This is a wonderful collection, and it arrives just at the right time.         —Paul Hoover

Beyond Gestures breathes vitality into the compact narratives crafted by the Franco-Belgian twins, Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray, who occupied a central role in the development of European surrealism.  Their translators, Robert Archambeau and Jean-Luc Garneau, skillfully capture the recurrent sense in these works of a beguiling, quirky, sometimes humorous or satirical—and occasionally weird—admixture of storytelling, quotidian observation, idiosyncratic commentary and childlike evocation. These translations convey a compelling sense of the imaginative lives of two writers who identified with one other so closely that they claimed joint authorship for everything they wrote. This volume holds countless delights.
—Cassandra Atherton

Two poets in Brussels, part of the surrealist milieu that gave rise to Cobra, the Situationists, Phases … they continued a hidden Surrealist activity with their friends during the war and occupation and published poetry with the great printmaker Pierre Alechinsky. Surrealism speaks here: dreams and everyday life, chance and madness, automatism and experiment.
—Penelope Rosemont

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