Guernica Editions

Mia Lecomte's capacity to see what others have not been able to see, to discern, poised between poetry that can never get too much of information or observation and is at the same time language, research and transparent description. Lecomte faces things (places, people, actions performed), constancy and subtraction, presence and absence, caught in their weakness or in their greatest splendour.

Mia Lecomte translates dreams that are dispersed and then recomposed. She makes them - I don't know how - coherent and also re-versible. I am impressed at how she creates this reversibility without resorting to references that flirt with trendy ideas. In each of the paths she follows, the originality of her style and inspiration are clear: they allow themselves to be followed and revealed. What results is a poetics of intimacy, discreet and disciplined but at the same time harsh, strong, expansive. I admire her concision and her gusto for litotes, her way of taking shortcuts, leaving aside the superfluous and the excessive: her refusal of rhetorical acrobatics and accumulations. Hers is an unmistakable voice.

Mia Lecomte is a quietly dazzling poet on her own terms. She is fed by multiple cultures; she is widely read, but her writing is unique and absolutely genuine. This is the most striking aspect of Lecomte's work: she has no quibbling or grandiose ego. In fact, the ego is all but absent. There is something Japanese in her clean, concise images, her incisive observations. They have a way of seeing anew. And for detail. And of a cool, devastating acceptance of eternal exile. Lecomte is a poet who must be read - for her counter-cultural self-effacement, her boldness, her succinctness, and the resulting beauty of her language.