Beyond Elsewhere

Ads in literary periodicals including Rain Taxi co-op funds social media promotion promotion on translators website feature at the ALTA conference “Beyond Elsewhere by French poet Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and translated by Hélène Cardona is a wonderfully lyric, mesmerizing poetic meditation on desire, love, the soul, and spirituality.  'Beyond Elsewhere' defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud.  As Arnou-Laujeac states: 'I now know human passion is exclusive, symbiotic, psychotropic, but that the key is the spell eluding it, the time that tears it to pieces.'  Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic — a beautiful new voice in poetry.” —Victoria Chang, PEN Center USA and California Book Award winner “Hélène Cardona's new translation confirms again her exquisite powers and imagination in turning Arnou-Laujeac’s amazing work into an English classic. She X-rays the original, and comes out with an inner picture faithful to beauty and the author’s flowing dexterity. Her singing flare illumines the English version, which is now the original. Discover Hélène's invitation to voyage.” —Willis Barnstone - Mexico in My Heart: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet)

A hauntingly beautiful book-length prose poem and a dazzling hymn to the currents of desire that shape each individual life."This incandescent metonym of light is, writ small, a marriage of eastern and western wisdoms--a bildungsroman describing the arc of a young man's journey from innocence, through passion and despair, to the great clarity of spiritual understanding. Arnou-Laujeac's intensely visual account, clothed in lyrical image and visionary flame, in Cardona's transcendent translation, easily carries us along in his brightly burning chariot in quest of the Divine."--Sidney Wade "Beyond Elsewhere defies definition, hovering in that physical space somewhere above us, just beyond reach, but visible in a breathless lyrical cloud. Arnou-Laujeac's poems are psychotropic--a beautiful new voice in poetry."--Victoria Chang Helene Cardona is an award-winning poet, literary translator, and actor.