Volte Face

In art as in life, the ‘volte face’, when someone turns around to confront someone else, is a moment of truth and a gesture of recognition that implies the acknowledgment of the other and the assertion of the self.

Volte Face by Dominique Hecq engages in a philosophical and aesthetic conversation with other arts. It comprises ekphrastic prose poems operating within a surrealist intertextual register. The poems are enmeshed in the discourses of writing at large, painting, music, dance, sculpture and architecture. They are arranged so as to create a rhythm with varying tonalities following the thematic thread of ‘making’.

Hecq’s Volte Face is playfully serious and seriously playful; it’s the grand reveal, the trip into the unknown, and the concise explanation of all those tiny things that make no sense at all. Each prose poem individually dazzles with such epiphanies as pop culture, art, politics, and philosophy – and all fuse under pressure into moments of head-spinning clarity.                 Oz Hardwick

Available as Digital book (downloadable PDF) or Softcover book