Here we have the infamy and drama of translation laid bare. Drafts of Gérard de Nerval lie next to Arjoon's own indelible poetry. This sudden marriage reads like a haunted Parisian bouquet that is lovingly losing its petals. The Disinherited invokes a state of total immersion/resurrection that both poets and translators speak of as idyllic.

The speaker in one of the poems in this indelible collection asks himself at some point: "Am I Nerval or Villon… Harris or Rodney?" His question echoes and distorts a line in Nerval’s own 'El Desdichado': 'Suis-je Amour ou Phoebus?.... Lusignan ou Biron?' If despair has muddled the identity of the original’s lovelorn speaker, it only makes sense that its translator’s also becomes blurred in his mirroring, exponential version. Just as Nerval’s speaker crosses the Acheron more than once, Arjoon goes back and forth between realms throughout The Disinherited, his own words and visions fusing inextricably with the dead’s, suffusing them with light. The result: an exquisite chiaroscuro.

Haunted by Nerval and making brilliant use of that possession, the magic-wielding Terrence Arjoon offers the delighted reader a series of precise dreamscapes that dance between the colloquial and the fabular. Level-headed yet moonstruck, these poems lodge in the neo-Romantic first person, but with stark, headstrong, Expressionist velocity, like a Godard montage godfathered by Georg Trakl. Reading The Disinherited, we thrill to the cropped outpourings of a timeless poetic instinct, without frills or simulations, except of the enrapturing kind; Arjoon has the knack of impersonating the Ur-text (in this case, Nerval’s) while sinuously transcending it. "Once I fled paradise and tried to be beautiful," Arjoon writes; marvelously he has succeeded in his quest.