The Escapades

French poet Marie-Noelle Agniau's English-language debut is a surreal and haunting work of transfiguration and rupture inspired by Ovid's Ocyrhoe. The Escapades builds on the Greek myth of a woman transformed into a horse by the obscure machinations of the Fates to tell the story of a human soul, both man and woman, that wanders among animals and children, haunted by the loss of its name, body, and voice. Agniau's eminently humane surrealism articulates questions of profound importance: the place of silence and speech, absence and love, in a troubled world.