Emerald Wounds

Erotic-macabre poetry by an overlooked Surrealist woman from the Middle East.

"You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me--and very objectively too--the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that's you."--Andr Breton

"Your poems know the essential cries, those which speak of passion in its vertigo."--Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space

The most significant Surrealist poet to emerge in 1950s Paris was a woman, Joyce Mansour. Mansour was a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt whose fierce, macabre, erotically charged works gave Andr Breton's Surrealist group a much-needed jolt after the ravages of the Second World War. Among new adherents, only Mansour wrote poems commensurate with those of Robert Desnos, Ren Char, Benjamin P ret, and other poets from the movement's heyday. Yet she remains curiously neglected in English translation, and even her posthumous reputation in France suffers from the patriarchal and chauvinist biases of the French literary establishment.

Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour is a much-needed corrective to this state of affairs, a compact yet career-spanning, bilingual anthology of this incendiary poet. With a biographical introduction by translator Emilie Moorhouse, who was drawn to Mansour's tough, take-no-prisoners stance during the societal reckoning of the #MeToo movement, Emerald Wounds showcases the entire arc of her trajectory as a poet, from the at-once gothic and minimalist fragments of her first collection in 1953, Screams, to the serpentine power of her final poems of the 1980s. Juxtaposing the original French poems with their English translations, Mansour's voice surges forward uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society that sees women as superficial objects of desire rather than multidimensional, autonomous subjects. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.