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Emerald Wounds Joyce Mansour

Emerald Wounds By Joyce Mansour

Emerald Wounds by Joyce Mansour


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Emerald Wounds Summary

Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour

Rediscover Joyce Mansour, the most significant Surrealist poet to emerge from 1950s Paris.

You know very well, Joyce, that you are for meand very objectively toothe greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, thats you.Andre Breton

Joyce Mansour, a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt, was 25 years old when she published her first book in Paris in 1953. Her fierce, macabre, erotically charged works caught the eye ofAndre Breton, who welcomed her into his Surrealist group and became her lifelong friend and ally. Despite her success in surrealist circles, her books received scant attention from the literary establishment, which is hardly surprising since Mansour's favorite topics happened to be two of society's greatest fears: death and unfettered female desire.

Now, over half a century later, Mansour's time has come. Emerald Wounds collects her most important work, spanning the entire arc of her career, from the gothic, minimalist fragments of her first published work to the serpentine power of her poems of the 1980s. In fresh new translations, Mansour's voice surges forth 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. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.

Emerald Wounds Reviews

"Im so grateful to Moorhouse for her helping bring this remarkable poets work to English readers, and help expand our knowledge of women writers throughout the worldhelping buck against the historical chauvinism Mansour endured. I know my bookshelf will be better for it.Diana Arterian,LitHub's The Annotated Nightstand

"Emilie Moorhouses sharp, steamy translation of Syrian-Jewish poet Joyce Mansour . . . Surreal incarnations of raw female powererotic, ragefulpermeate."Rebecca Morgan Frank, LitHub

This ardent, well-honed collection coaxes Mansours 'molecules of revolt' into jewel-bright, posthumous flares.Joyelle McSweeney, Full Stop

"Erotic, subversive, sensual, vivacious, defiant, fragile, satirical, ironic, lyrical, eruptive, heretical, anguished, sexy, and buoyant.Allan Graubard, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"This is a very welcome translation, one English readers can trust. Mansour should be far more read (in both French and English) than she is. Emilie Moorhouse has performed an invaluable service to her and to French literature in English."Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, Cable Street

"Slippery, stained, and gloriously indelicate, Joyce Mansour reveals to us the grisly face of eros."Elaine Kahn, author ofWomen in Public

"Fierce, uncompromising, intelligent, weird, assertive, abjectJoyce Mansour's poems are a long cry of female rage and desire. The world is 'a shitting bird,' the dead 'bloom like Parma hams,' and the patriarchy subverted, mocked, & challenged at every turn, in personal relationships with men, in the fatuous advice of women's magazines. 'I do not know hell,' Mansour writes, 'But my body has been burning ever since I was born.' These poems are the searing result of that life."Kim Addonizio, author of Now We're Getting Somewhere

"It is high time (and way past it!) that someone bring to publishing daylight the truly great range of poems by the English/Egyptian writer artist/entertainer Joyce Patricia Ades, whom we salute as Joyce Mansour. Emilie Moorhouse has just accomplished this feat and we can gladly say, to this bilingual and welcome presentation of a large selection of those texts with City Lights, a very loud hooray!"Mary Ann Caws, author of Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism: Selected Essays

"Among the many dark pleasures of Emerald Wounds, most marvelous is Joyce Mansour's canny adaptation of the Surrealist impulse towards revolt to subversively femme ends. In Emilie Moorhouse's astonishingly fresh translations, these palm-sized poems are arousing, alarming, and, finally, transformational, offering outlandish anti-psalms, sex tips from the devil, adroit instruction manuals for surviving the eradicating world. Like emeralds held so tightly they bite the flesh, these poems are compressed, brilliant works of maximum refulgence."Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne

"In Joyce Mansour's exuberant, macabre, strange and sexy poems, I find such kinship, such lineage, such permission. It is such a delight to read this collection and meet her. These poems invite me to be brave, to be loud, to cackle and mourn and seduce. I only wish we'd met sooner, that Id known sooner to place myself in her lineage."Safia Elhillo, author of Girls That Never Die

"Transgressive delight and terror of the supreme surreal feminist in this remarkable and most original book of dreams. Mansour, 'an animal of the night,' has been waiting to be reclaimed and counted. She who 'prunes the sky with carnivorous thighs,' who ruse lies in a chignon is wonderfully abetted in these excellent, luminous translations. A poet who listens to the 'dialect of undressed sexes,' and 'pierces the stagnant eye of the night' is the aligning, yet jolting force we've all been anticipating. This is her moment."Anne Waldman,author of Bard, Kinetic

"In the poetry of Joyce Mansour, we feel the churn of the devouring and excreting body and its parts. Each part emits parts: the lover births his sex; the receptive octopus outputs its legs like a burst seedpod. Vicious as childbirth, delicate as the tension in a throat about to speak, Mansour's poems demand we attend to the forbidden maximums of our desires."Sophia Dahlin, author of Natch

"This legendary Surrealist woman poet with her singular lyric fusion of love and death, phantasies of gleeful and grim inexorability, constructs radical strategies of irrational disjunction. . . .Translated with verve by Emilie Moorhouse."Norma Cole, author of Fate News

"Emerald Wounds feels like a resuscitation. Joyce Mansour's Arab Jewish consciousness sticks its tongue out in the face of macho Euro mores. Given new breath by translator Emilie Moorhouse, Mansour's work is phantastic, inverted, explicit, full of spells. It seems to predict and override the world's weakening lust, calling out from a past of feverish slits, Sekhmet and the joy of piss."Tamara Faith Berger, author of Maidenhead

A revelation and delight to see: a poet whose work still speaks with immediacy decades after she was alive. We love seeing the original language juxtaposed against the translation here done superbly by Emilie Moorhouse. Brava to all.Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

Sparse and elegant . . . shot through with blood and violence, and a fierce sexuality borne of a life veined with loss and exile.Susan Norton, Carmichaels Bookstore (Louisville, KY)

About Joyce Mansour

Joyce Mansour (author) was born in England in 1928 to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt when she was still an infant. Mansour was part of the inner circle of Surrealists, a close friend of Andre Breton, and the most significant poet to join the group after World War II. She wrote 16 books of poetry, as well as prose, works, and plays. She lived in Paris, France until her death in 1986 at age of 58.

Emilie Moorhouse (translator & co-editor) holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Raised in a French-speaking household in Toronto, Canada, she now lives in Montreal where she works as a teacher, writer, translator, and environmentalist.

Garrett Caples (editor) is a poet and an editor for City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He is also the co-editor of the Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia, editor of Preserving Fire: Selected Prose by Philip Lamantia, and author of the poetry collection Lovers of Today (2021). He lives in San Francisco, CA.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Translators Introduction

Editorial Note

Cris (1953) / Screams

Je te souleve dans mes bras

I lift you in my arms

Lamazone mangeait son dernier sein.

The amazon was eating her last breast

Chien bleu nez enfonce dans la terre

Blue dog whose nose is buried in the sand

Je veux me montrer nue a tes yeux chantants.

I want to be naked in your singing eyes.

Ton enfant dans tes bras.

Your child in your arms

Fievre ton sexe est un crabe

Fever your sex is a crab

Une femme creait le soleil

A woman created the sun

Couchee sur mon lit

Lying on my bed

Jai un esprit inquiet.

I have a worried mind

Combien damours ont fait crier ton lit?

How many loves made your bed cry out?

Coquillage qui traine sur une plage deserte

Seashell lying on an empty beach

Que mes seins te provoquent

May my breasts provoke you

Dechirures (1955) / Shreds

La mort est une marguerite qui dort

Death is a daisy sleeping

Jai vole loiseau jaune

I stole the yellow bird

Invitez-moi a passer la nuit dans votre bouche

Invite me to spend the night in your mouth

Dans le monde sans verdure

In a world without greenery

Hurlements dune montagne

Shrieks from a mountain giving birth

Je suis la nuit

I am the night

Cetait hier:

It was yesterday.

La nappe rouge

The red tablecloth

Pleure petit homme

Cry little man

Danse avec moi petit violoncelle

Dance with me, little cello

La maree monte sous la pleine lune des aveugles.

The tide is rising under the full moon of the blind.

Je veux dormir avec toi coude a coude

I want to sleep with you elbow to elbow

Lorage tire une marge argentee

The storm draws a silver line

poems from BIEF (19581960)

Le Missel de la Miss (Bonnes Nuits) / The Missel of the Missus (Good Nights)

i) Quelques Conseils En Courant Sur Quatre Roues

i) Advice for Running on Four Wheels

ii) Il Fait Foid? Une Robe Simpose

ii) Cold Out? A Dress Is Essential

iii) Lignes Autour Dun Cercle

iii) Lines Around a Circle

Geneve

Geneva

Conseils Pratiques en Attendant

Practical Advice While You Wait

Ce Qui Se Porte Cet Hiver

What to Wear This Winter

Ce Qui Ne Se Porte Pas CetHiver

What Not to Wear This Winter

Conseils dune Consur

Advice from a Sister

Rapaces (1960) / Birds of Prey

Rhabdomancie

Dowsing

Chant Arabe

Arab Song

Carre Blanc (1965) / White Square

I: Ou le Bas Blesse / I: Where the Shoe Hurts

Dans Lobscurite A Gauche

In the Dark to the Left

Leger Comme Une Navette Le Desir

Light as a Shuttle Desire

Lappel Amer dun Sanglot

The Bitter Call of Tears

Dans Le Sillage Du Mont-Arbois

In the Wake of Mont-Arbois

Nuit De Veille Dans Une Cellule En Cristal De Roche

Sleepless Nights in a Cell of Rock Crystal

Le Soleil Dans Le Capricorne

Sun in Capricorn

II: LHeure Erogene / II: The Erogenous Hour

Fleurie Comme La Luxure

Flowered Like Lewdness

Seance Tenante

Right Away

Papier Dargent

Tin Foil

LAmoureuse Guerriere

Woman Warrior in Love

Souvenir Impose par le Nord au Sud Vaincu

Memories Imposed by the North on a Conquered South

Sous la Tour Centrale

Under the Central Tower

III: Verres Fumes / III: Smoked Glasses

LHeure Velue

The Hairy Hour

La Piste du Brouillard

The Path of Fog

La Facade de lObsession

The Face of Obsession

Heureux les Etourdis

Happy Are the Stunned

Des Myriads dAutres Morts

A Myriad of More Deaths

Sonne nEcoute Personne nEcoute Per

One Listen to No One Listen to No

Les Damnations (1967) / Damnations

Au-Dela de la House

Beyond the Swell

Minuit a Perte de Vue

Endlessly Midnight

Pandemonium (1976) / Pandemonium

Jasmin dHiver (1982) / Winter Jasmine

Flammes Immobiles (1985) / Still Flames

Ne jamais dire son reve

Never share your dream

Les eaux de ce pays-la ne secoulent jamais

The waters of that country never flow

Bruler lencense dans la quietude

To burn incense in the quiet of a room

Trous Noirs (1986) / Black Holes

Additional information

GOR013723389
9780872869011
0872869016
Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour
Used - Very Good
Paperback
City Lights Books
2023-09-07
256
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Emerald Wounds