IN THE REALM OF MOTES
by Baptiste Gaillard
translated by Aditi Machado
A stunning work of prose poetry from award-winning Swiss poet Baptiste Gaillard brilliantly translated by Aditi Machado, In the Realm of Motes is a key ecological text that celebrates the infinitesimal and the ephemeral in their entropic yet orchestral movements of aggregation, fragmentation, and mutation. Both Gaillard’s language and what these prose poems point to break apart, absorb, and shape a unique space that is both easily comprehended and entirely strange. At one moment we’re reading about a lake or a forest and the next our deepest meditations and alarms. These short prose poems must be read to understand the lower layer connecting us and our surroundings.
Praise for Baptiste Gaillard
Gaillard’s journey through an “empire of water-logged objects” and labyrinths of dust illuminates “dazzling zones of unprecedented shapes,” blooming from infra-worlds within and beyond the human present: “what lives in water becomes water.” In the Realm of Motes is a tour de force celebration, amid chaos and turmoil, of matter’s potential for endlessly new beginnings.
– Jonathan Skinner, founder of ecopoetics
In a Realm of Motes sediments the prose poem with its substances and strata that comprise our beautiful world. Aditi Machado’s translations of Baptiste Gaillard’s poems are luminously textured and tender—a pure delight in the vibrancy of eco-materialism—with each line bringing to the surface Gaillard’s terrestrial dramas of guano on stones and on windows, insects caught in webs, and clumps of hair in u-bend pipes. Here are poems that find awe in the roughness of ecological forms, in the slimy, vaporous, decomposing sludge from which all creative energies are renewed!
– Orchid Tierney, author of this abbatoir is a college
Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes is a startling suite of poems. Aditi Machado’s translation makes accessible Gaillard’s poetics, which “teeters constantly between impasse and epiphany” through the legibility of decay, of rot, of the immaculate infiltration of water. In the Realm of Motes gives language to the insurgency of a system at work; “a series of wastelands organizes itself under a regime of drought.” The lyric is tidal, the movement is everywhere.
– C.T. Salazar. author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking
About the Author
Baptiste Gaillard is a writer, artist, and arts educator. He has exhibited installations and objects in galleries and art spaces in Switzerland and Europe. Language has gradually become the subject of his work, and he has since regularly published his texts in magazines, as well as six books, including Un domaine des corpuscules (Swiss Literature Prize, 2018), Ombres blanches sur fond presque blanc, and Un test de fragilité. His work explores the thresholds of the sensible and tells of materials and transient states, like the condensation on a window that disappears as soon as it is imprinted.
About the Translator
Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her books include a translation of Farid Tali’s novel Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016) and the poetry collections from Nightboat: Material Witness (2024), Emporium (2020; James Laughlin Award), and Some Beheadings (2017; The Believer Poetry Award). She is also a contributor Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Ursula Andkjær’s mistranslation project Ancient Algorithms forthcoming from Sarabande Books. She lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio.