Rasu-Yong Tugen, Baroness de Tristeombre - a dark elegy for an already-forgotten planet and its wandering, somnambulistic inhabitants. It resurrects the literary tradition of Dark Romanticism – poetry that is stark, sparse, and drenched in a blackened lyricism

Rasu-Yong Tugen, Baroness de Tristeombre, Songs from the Black Moon. gnOme, 2014. 

All the trees whose names we have forgotten have long since embraced our entwined limbs.

In the tradition of the 19th century, fin-de-siècle prose poem, Songs from the Black Moon is a dark elegy for an already-forgotten planet and its wandering, somnambulistic inhabitants.

“A book of beautiful and strangely tranquil outbursts of disaffection and dissolution. I wish everyone on earth lived by the sentiments expressed within it.” — Thomas Ligotti

“In search of an atrabilious poetics that might render breathable the ‘black abyss’ within, the Baronesse de Tristeombre has written an apocryphal rejoinder to the Book of Lamentations, filled with salt, sand, crystal and leprous flesh. Read this grimoire of ‘tectonic sorrow’ and despair anew.” — Drew Daniel

“In the black light of these lunar songs, you and I despair for the last time, again.” — Pseudo-Leopardi

“Songs from the Black Moon resurrects the literary tradition of Dark Romanticism – poetry that is stark, sparse, and drenched in a blackened lyricism . . . These poems are ecstatic lamentations for the world-without-us . . . ” — Eugene Thacker



Rasu-Yong Tugen, Baroness de Tristeombre, A Natural History of Seaweed Dreams. gnOme, 2016. 




“Plankton-fed, sleep-drugged eyes cast down in the direction of the sacred.”
“Manta rays bloom in cosmic night.”
A collection of prose poems reduced to their elemental, mineral quintessence. A Natural History of Seaweed Dreams is a companion volume to Songs from the Black Moon.


“One does not read the Baroness’s poems, one inhales them – like air, like mist, like vapour.” — Sarojini Naidu


“Every poem, as it nears perfection, achieves its own silence. If the poems in this book were any more precise, they would disappear entirely.” — Haruo Sato


“What we dimly call the natural world is but a decaying and fecund hallucination creeping out of our very bodies. The poems in this book prove it. They are not even poems; they are taxonomies.”
— Jean Lorrain

This companion volume is both more and less than its predecessor, Songs from the Black Moon. It's an improvement in being largely absent of the banal, angst-ridden passages which made the author seem, at times, closer to an embryonic existentialist than a cosmic pessimist. At the same time, hardly any of the entries in Seaweed Dreams are as incisive or memorable as the best material in Black Moon. This is, however, not so much a flaw as it is a quality of this new volume's vision being far more coherent as opposed to Black Moon's more diary-like approach.
In spite of its inferiority on an entry-by-entry level, Seaweed Dreams continues the work that Black Moon largely failed to do: that is, offer a more sustained vision into the "world-without-us", as one particular blurb mentioned on the first volume's back cover. The dominance of collective nouns suggests a further diminution of the individual and the continued quest toward reaching universal impersonality; the latter being very significant as it had been mentioned as far back as the first entry of Black Moon. Many picturesque descriptions of a post-anthropocene Earth give a sense of our species' humble return to the anonymity of the natural world. Perhaps the most striking image-based motif is that of human bones merging indistinguishably with coral, shells and other fragmented marine matter. These aspects--the mantra of impersonality, a post-human planet, the return to anonymity in extinction--all elevate Seaweed Dreams far above its predecessor, if only by the sustained coherence of its vision.
Still, in certain ways, Seaweed Dreams contains some of the same flaws or, perhaps, just potentially alienating qualities as those found in Black Moon. Even in the briefest passages, heavily adjective-laden phrases abound to the point of being somewhat awkward in rhythmic flow. Still, those who relished the nearly archaic tone and self-consciously eloquent style of the first volume will relish the same Decadent-flavored language found here.
This kind of luxuriant diction, however, becomes problematic when considered in relation to the overarching vision of a dying mankind's return to the world of mere matter. Entries such as the following--"The rotation of planets. Partially exhausted. Somewhat tired."--engages the pathetic fallacy in such a way as to, once again, affirm and accept the same human detritus of personal emotions and thoughts that this quest toward impersonality has attempted to negate. I wouldn't belabor what I perceive as a slight disjuncture between the book's language and its vision if there weren't also passages here which come so miraculously close to giving the reader that impossible, ultimate vision into the world-without-us; here's one of the finest examples, and one that is all the more stunning for its being the only entry to feature the word, human:
Suspended ghostly spine, flowing necks, convulsions of quiet
calcification, borrowing all shape, tangled in other
dimensions, reduced to a shape once human.
For all of its flaws and apparently oblivious contradictions, A Natural History of Seaweed Dreams gives the willing reader something which so few books have the austere wisdom to offer: an understanding of ourselves--of humanity--as a point to think past, beyond which thought itself dissolves... - J.D.G.