LOST PROFILES ~

 

R E A D   M E

   City Lights, 2016

JOYCE MANSOUR ~

 

Under the Central Tower

For Matta

Hands wandered on the keys

And strange words came from Her

Floating to the surface of the creek

I listened to the dialect of undressed sexes

Hands were writing on valves

Twenty-four seven

And assassinations would follow

In the same bluish twilight where steel snakes whistle

Where gulls shriek and mature women blossom

With swollen pistils and cheap wounds

I was a bit intimidated

It would have been so delicious

To piss in the street

___________________

Joyce Mansour

translated by Emilie Moorhouse

EMERALD WOUNDS

City Lights, 2023

DORA MAAR ~

 

RENE MAGRITTE ~

 

MAGRITTE

a biography by Alex Danchev

Pantheon 2021

ALICE PAALEN RAHON ~

 

Varda Poem

                                     for Yanko

You who taught numbers to know the rainbow

Who opened every door in the celestial city

Who always made more when there was less

Who enchanted birds

Who loved all things except the mean

Should you be seen

Dancing in your golden ashes

About half a league off our port beam

As we go out the Gate

While the sun sets clear

Will you tell us one more time

How hard it is to be human

When it's so easy to be divine

_______________________

Shapeshifter

Alice Paalen Rahon

New York Review of Books

Translated by Mary Ann Caws

2021

PAUL NOUGE ~

Notes, illustrated with nineteen

photographs by the author

translated by M. Kasper

afterword, Xavier Canonne

“Belgian Surrealism’s greatest intellectual.”—Francis Ponge

First edited and published by Marcel Marien in 1968 in a limited edition of 230 copies, half a year after Paul Nougé’s death, The Subversion of Images is a miniature classic in both the photobook and surrealist canons. It collects Nougé’s notes and photographs from 1929–1930 to form a guidebook to the surrealist image. Nougé here outlines his conception of the object and outlines the Surrealist approach to it, while also offering an accompaniment to the visual work of his colleague, René Magritte, whose paintings he sometimes titled. How might a tangle of string elicit terror? How might the suppression of an object move one to sentimentality? What is the effect of a pair of gloves on a loaf of sliced bread?

Nougé’s accompanying photographs explore these notions, and feature a number of his Belgian Surrealist colleagues. This translation is presented as a facsimile of the original edition, with an afterword by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musée de la Photographie.

Paul Nougé (1895–1967), a biochemist by trade, was a leading light of Belgian Surrealism and its primary theorist, as well as a decisive influence on such future Lettrists and Situationists as Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman, who would take inspiration from his conception of plagiarism for what would come to be termed “détournement.” Decidedly unambitious when it came to literary celebrity, Nougé’s guidance nevertheless steered the Brussels Surrealist group toward a more rational approach to visual and verbal language that discarded the Parisian Surrealists’ proclivity for irrationality and occultism.

Wakefield Press

2019