In the Glittering Maw

The first English-language collection focused on the later works of Joyce Mansour, an Arab-Jewish Surrealist poet who was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s and settled in Paris. Mansour’s late poems chart constellations of desire, femininity, and dream. Considered by Andre Bréton to be the preeminent Surrealist of the post-war period, Mansour brings this masculine movement into a feminine realm never-before-imagined. She insists on a forgotten or perhaps vehemently denied eventuality of women’s equality: their ability to do harm, to be violent: “Why tear fire from the impalpable sky / When it already grows and smolders in me / Why throw your glove into the crowd / Tomorrow is a livid stump.” In the Glittering Maw is poet C. Francis Fisher’s first translation and includes a preface by eminent Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws.

"C. Francis Fisher’s translations of Joyce Mansour’s later poems give fresh voice to a fierce, passionate, sensuous, scandalous cry that has strained to be heard in the Anglophone world for over half a century. It’s about time." —MARK POLIZZOTTI

"Guillaume Apollinaire, Nelly Sachs, Frank O’Hara—how strange to find the magnificent Joyce Mansour, in C. Francis Fischer’s sinewy and imaginative translation, summoning that trio of revolutionary voices! Most of my life has been spent in ignorance of Mansour’s eccentric and eruptive genius. Thanks to this indispensable new translation, I can make amends, and hug close to me this most corporeal and threshold-traversing poet, who seems, like Louise Bourgeois, to be the apostle of fleshly metamorphosis. Torn between difficulty and joy, Mansour makes new—and blissfully out-of-bounds—limbs and organs emerge in every line, like a shower of comets." —WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

"Although allied to Surrealism, Joyce Mansour’s work exceeds the strictures of that movement—one could say that she stopped the surrealists in their tracks by giving body (parts) to their boy-dreams—proposing erotic visions that foreshadow the likes of Carolee Schneemann. What Serge Gavronsky called Mansour’s 'verbal form of cannibalism' is also an anguished meditation on death & freedom, ferociously anchored in the black humor of the uprooted & eternally exiled." —PIERRE JORIS

"There is of course nothing little in this truly important poet, and this translation is no nibble at her production: this is a gulp worth gulping." —MARY ANN CAWS

“Don’t give her access to the morgue: she’ll wake the corpses.” —ALAIN BOSQUET

French Literature. Surrealism. Women's Studies. Arab-Jewish Studies. Translation.