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""Addressing all the major themes that preoccupied Breton throughout his career—from Trotskyism and anti-colonialism to anti-rationalism, the role of the marvelous, and the 'complete liberation of poetry and, through it, of life'—these late essays amount to the last word of one of the most influential aesthetic minds of the 20th century. They also give us a vivid portrait of an age drawn through the arts and artists that so profoundly marked it. Austin Carder has performed a monster feat of translation here, catching every nuance of Breton's sinuous, faceted thinking, and Garrett Caples' substantial introduction draws on his extensive scholarship to give the reader the historical, political, and social background necessary to grasp its intricacies and impact."" —Cole Swensen, author of And And And ""André Breton within his penultimate range of living issued fumes from a monument of orchids sans Metropolitan concrete and anguish. Via Cavalier Perspective (this belatedly translated voltage) he thrives within waves of his immeasurable aural spell. The latter by means of a blinding convoluted majestic that simultaneously transmutes by means of interior eddy. Within this mesmeric conjointment he powerfully witnesses Artaud, magnifying their mutually thriving poetic identity not unlike magically etched lightning by psychically seeded weather. This interior tenor pervades Cavalier Perspective as it persists by inner lingual leap, always hailing beyond tendentious rationality, the latter charred by delimited lingual essence. Within its refracted state of fractional detritus, its intent is infected by fossilized tenor weighed as it is by linear clotting. Thus the latter state attempts to retain its lostness vis-á-vis instillment by magnification as history.""—Will Alexander, author of Divine Blue Light (For John Coltrane)

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Founder, leader, and chief theoretician of the surrealist movement, the poet Andre Breton with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, and helped form a French contingent of Dada under the leadership of Tristan Tzara. But already Breton and his friends were moving beyond the absolute negation of Dada to Surrealism, a movement rooted in pure psychic automatism, desire, chance, poetry, and the marvelous. Under Breton's leadership, Surrealism became the most vital European avant-garde of interwar high modernism, its influence extending to Egypt, Japan, and the Caribbean. Exiled to the United States during the Second World War, due to the Nazi occupation, Breton would return to Paris in 1945 and continue to lead the movement until his death in 1966. Austin Carder is the translator of Poetries by Georges Schehade (Song Cave, 2021). He received a B.A. in English from Yale and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown. He lives in San Francisco. Garrett Caples is a poet and an editor at City Lights Books. He is most recently the author of a book of fables, Proses (Wave, 2024), and a poetry collection, Lovers of Today (Wave, 2021). He lives in San Francisco.

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