Isidore Ducasse, the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-1870), born of French parents in Montevideo, moved to Paris in 1859 and published the earliest installments of his legendary prose poem, The Cantos of Maldoror, in 1868. The complete text of this book and of the mysterious Poesies were published after Lautreamonts premature, mysterious death in a hotel on Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre.

The influence of his work on modern French poetry, and in particular on the origins of Surrealism, were profound, and have been celebrated by figures as diverse as Andre Breton, Valery Larbaud, and Henry Miller.

Lautreamont remains the prophet of liberated poetry. A forerunner of Surrealism and psychoanalysis, his brief opus allows us to glimpse the mind of a tormented and imperfect writer, possessed by genius, who, influenced by the gothic, macabre visions of Milton, Byron, Poe, and Mathurin, fashioned a sublime nightmare. As Mark Polizzotti convincingly demonstates, the a! im of this nightmare was nothing less than to force an entry into the dawn of total consciousness.

But reader beware: just as we begin to make sense of Maldorors startling imagery, to entrap Lautreamont into a system of meaning, the enigma is renewed by the apparent about-face of the Poesies, a series of aphorisms that revisit and correct the great French moral philosophers.

In Lautreamont Nomad, Polizzotti provides English-speaking readers with the ideal introduction to the works of Isidore Ducasse. He explores the life, ideas, themes, and style of this writer of miraculous prose and renders him accessible to the general reader. In these pages, we begin to glimpse the heart of this most solitary and mysterious of writers, one whose power and opacity remain intact more than a century after his death.