Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon and translated by Mary Ann Caws

This is poetry from France.

Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon translated by Mary Ann Caws is published by New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The. This is a Book originally written in French. This was published in 2021.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781681375007E12.

Shapeshifter, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, brings Alice Paalen Rahon’s French-language work into English through New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The. Published in 2021, it is best approached as a book of encounter rather than as a book to solve. Paalen Rahon’s title announces metamorphosis, and the book sits naturally near surrealism, visual art, feminine myth, and unstable selfhood. I would begin with the poem itself: the image that refuses to behave, the phrase that gives the page a new temperature, the pressure of voice moving from one language into another. Good translated poetry does not only deliver information about France. It changes the reader’s sense of what English can hold, which makes this volume both a literary record and a readerly invitation.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.