The first desire is to bring Hortense Raynal’s cartographic obsession closer to that which Lana Del Rey sang in Arcadia – «My body is a map of LA» –, imagining herself cracked by the endless flows of cars that cross the city of angels. Except that the Aveyron poetess does not dip her pen in the fumes of exhaust gases, and maps herself rather in green and yellow, fields, wetlands, plains and valleys. In We are swamps, published by the Brussels editions maelstrÖm reEvolution, it stages the geographical games of which it is the center and of which nature is the heroine: “My body and its topography / food for geographers / swamps in the brain / deserts in the back / hills in the shape of a chest / cultivated fields in the left ventricle / wastelands in the right.”
Born in Rodez in 1993, Hortense Raynal “went to the capital” to do Normale sup and realized that she did not want to lose her pais, his accent, his campaign. From her neo-urban tugs and her childhood memories, she drew a first book in 2021, Ruralities (to Moon Dessert Notebooks), and fled Paris for the South.
His second book is to be opened like one unfolds a map. We walk there from point to point, we can get lost. Body mapping also serves as a pretext for a musky and soft eroticism (“I will drown you in my lakes / I will make you grow rapeseed”). By delimiting spaces and imagining replacing the compass (“forget the GPS it never existed”), Hortense Raynal questions the place of the body in the world around it: “Does there remain a bit of me in the Pyrenees where I pissed last summer and vice versa” ?
The extract
I stagger with cards
I map from another trough
mountains in me
mountains in my lungs
curtains of mountains in my lungs
soil, prison, cracks under my armpits
that you lick.
Solar Thigh Hay Bale Carrier
it wakes up the groves in the belly which almost aches
and finally sleep
and still sleeps
child or a feast
of a love or of an illness
uproar me and
face a wheel, the deserts on my forehead
I recognize them, they are those of young age! those of creation.