Her work has been described as "linguistically explosive and socially relevant,"[3] and praised for "deploy[ing] tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit.
Gerard DeGré, Ducornet's father, was a professor of social philosophy, and her mother Muriel hosted community-interest programs on radio and television.
[6] Ducornet's father encouraged her to read books by authors such as Albert Camus and Lao Tzu, and to pursue an exploration of knowledge.
[6] Ducornet spent part of her childhood in Egypt, the setting for her 2003 novel Gazelle, after her father received an invitation to teach at the University of Cairo.
As a young girl, Ducornet dreamed of being a visual artist and it wasn't until she moved to France with her husband that she began to seriously think about writing.
[9] In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe, and in 1989 accepted a teaching position in the English Department at the University of Denver.
[6] In Ducornet's first book, The Butcher’s Tales, she dealt with ideas of "conveying moral understanding, a visceral need to confront abusive Authority in its many forms, and to fully engage the beautiful", all themes that reoccur in her later work.
[16] Ducornet has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Forrest Gander, Kate Bernheimer, and Anne Waldman among others.
In 2017, Ducornet partnered with multimedia artist Margie McDonald in a collaborative installation show at the Northwind Arts Center in Port Townsend.
[18] These scrolls were painted during a month long residency at the Vermont Studio Center prior to Ducornet and McDonald's collaboration.
Ducornet’s book Phosphor In Dreamland, is sometimes included alongside the original tetralogy as presenting a fifth element, being light or dream.