Eliot Cardinaux: Quiet Labor

The first in a chronological trio of books by Eliot Cardinaux released in 2024, Quiet Labor braids and unbraids a double loss in the poet’s life. Cardinaux works in a cinematic scrawl across an intimate, liminal landscape rife with the unresolved candor of ruin and continuity.

“Eliot is one of those rare poets who achieves poetry’s most challenging endeavor: to charge the gnomic lyric with immense sweeps in clarity of thought and feeling. These lines unravel and transform despite (or because of) their dissolution toward an elsewhere more estranged, and thereby more exhilarating, than their origins.”

—Ocean Vuong

Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator working at the intersection of the lyric and improvised music. The author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), Eliot has produced over a dozen albums of original music, as well, including American Thicket (Loyal Label, 2016) with Mat Maneri, Thomas Morgan, and Flin van Hemmen, and most recently, Imminence (self-released, 2024), with American percussionist Gary Fieldman. He is the founding editor of The Bodily Press.