Out of Bounds is a sequence of poems in three parts. It is a double story of dislocation that explores autobiographical fragments drawing on the protagonist's experience of migration and motherhood. It draws together the two strands to reveal a subject at pains to re-define herself through language in a space circumscribed by sexuality, culture, and post-colonial politics. Succinct and astonishingly vivid, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form.

'Dominique Hecq writes through dulled topographies of mourning, avowing death is a "singular fear of finitude against a background of black light." Autobiographical, and sharply particular, Hush takes readers into an abyss where "grief is a caesura" and loss means "being hostage to a ghost." But this book is not only a poignant elegy to "losing your mother tongue and cracking your own voice"; Hush is also an incandescent lament from an "un / harmed" speaker locating the possibilities and lexicons of d nouement. Silencing the undertones of a surpassing grief, Hecq's quest is finally epic and...