M Renae Dubois
Art, Poetry and Philosophy
My name is Alexa Young
Who is M Renae Dubois?
M Renae Dubois is a Brisbane-based poet, visual artist, and self-published philosopher operating under her own imprint, Dubois Press.
Raised in a religious household, Renae sustained a head injury at sixteen that altered her personality and accelerated her philosophical development. In the years that followed, she worked as a sole-operating escort in Brisbane for most of her adult life — a choice she once called empowering and now understands as privileged — a distinction her work is honest enough to hold. Her work also engages addiction, psychiatric experience, complex family relationships, and a prolonged legal battle, approached with the same analytical directness she applies to everything else.
Her seven published collections span biographical verse, anthology, and philosophical poetry. Her most recent, An Encounter: Poetry, Existentialism, advances original arguments in dialogue with Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir.
She coined the word integrous to describe the central commitment of her life and work.
My education is unofficial, formed in the Crucible not the Conservatorium.
Renae does not use AI for creation or creative direction (she uses her brain).
Coming Soon
What is a Wreck: A Reckoning?
This book is written for the woman who always questioned if she was enough. A continuation in M Renae Dubois’ personal philosophical and personal journey after a head injury, Renae writes within this context and beyond it, telling her own story of working in the adult industry and dealing with addiction and bad relationships. This work faces the question of interior world vs exterior perception, and as the title indicates, it is a personal reckoning. Very relatable, in its own way.
What is An Encounter, Poetry, Existentialism?
A poetic endeavour of discovery, discussion, and occasional disagreement with the proponents and parties in the areas of existentialism, absurdism, and phenomenology. A fresh perspective by a formerly unknowing practitioner, and author of Curses of Verses: A Composite.
What is the book Curses of Verses?
It is composite collection of M Renae Dubois' first three biographical verse-novels which documented the first thirty-five years of her adult life after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) at 16. The head injury radically altered her personality and direction. What followed was seemingly logical at the time: sex work, addiction, love, of course. But then there were the psychiatric wards, and more, Renae keeps a quick mind and a quiet wit, despite her unrelenting selfexamination, and she has documented it all through unabashed poetry. This work is philosophy in verse, through the Crucible, not the Conservatorium.
Intent
The actors responsible morals
Are to the art which comes from a god
Whatever your spiritual leanings
There's no other way it is got
So to those who would question the artist
The actor, the poet, or whore
I ask you consider a moment
For what, do you do all what for?
Cos the time that was spent in deciding
To commit to path rocky and hard
To challenge ones ethics on daily
Just for the sake of integrous art
Is its own religious-type calling
In fact, it's artists and clerics who know
That there’s no choice in the path you are walking
And the spirits are sending you flow
