This marks the publication of the first English-language translation of Poetic Intention, Glissant's classic meditation on poetry and art. In this wide-ranging book, Glissant discusses poets, including Stephane Mallarme and Saint-John Perse, and visual artists, such as the Surrealist painters Matta and Wilfredo Lam, arguing for the importance of the global position of art. He states that a poem, in its intention, must never deny the "way of the world." Capacious, inventive, and unique, Glissant's Poetic Intention creates a new landscape for understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

In a Paper City write nothing down. So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, the author's two mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the letters characters "n" and "b," and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences. Beneath this thin narrative runs an undercurrent of horror that decries the deliberate plunder of the City resulting from an absolute disregard for history's relationship to the body's fictions - what "n" and "b" term 'art lost to numbers.'

Middle-aged and short on prospects, Charles Wilson returns to Trempes, the village of his childhood, and discovers the body of his childhood friend, Paul Faber, hanging from a tree in the clearing where they played as boys. Thus begins Wilson's obsessive quest to exhume the secrets of his past and to understand the reasons for his friend's death. But memories shift, people change and things are never as they seem. Soon Wilson finds himself caught up in a delusory spiral that threatens his very existence.

This is at once a neo-Gothic metaphysical thriller and a meticulous meditation on the unapologetic betrayal of memory and imagination. Wilson's story bubbles up from the faults between mystery and fairy tale, brimming with characters haunted and tortured by the past, where truth and deception are wound up in time like the gnarled branches of old, grizzled trees.