Shapeshifter (Nyrb Poets) - Softcover

Alice Paalen Rahon; Mary Ann Caws

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1681375001 ISBN 13: 9781681375007

Publisher: The New York Review of Books, Inc, 2021

Synopsis

Poetry by one of the most powerful female figures in twentieth-century surrealism, now collected in English for the very first time.

Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Along with her first husband, the artist Wolfgang Paalen, her circle included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. Bicultural, bisexual, and fiercely independent, her romantic life included affairs with Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose. This new selection of Rahon's poems, included both in the original French and in translation by Mary Ann Caws, celebrates the visionary work of a woman who defied easy definition. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and her travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness.

About this title

About the Author

Alice Paalen Rahon (1904-1987), born Alice Marie Yvonne Phillipot, was a surrealist painter and poet. Raised in Paris, she became involved in the city's surrealist subculture in the 1920s and married the Austrian surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen in 1931. She and Wolfgang traveled to North and Latin America in the late 1930s, and settled in Mexico in 1940. There, they became fixtures in the surrealist community, befriending Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Rahon wrote three books of poetry and contributed to the surrealist journal Dyn. After divorcing and remarrying, Rahon remained in Mexico City, adopting elements of its landscape, culture, and symbolism in her visual work. She stopped painting in the late 1970s and lived much of her later years in seclusion.

Mary Ann Caws is the Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of dozens of books, including Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing, The Surrealist Look, and Surprised in Translation; the editor of The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry; and the translator of, among many others, Andre Breton, Rene Char, Robert Desnos, and Paul Éluard.

Edition details

• Publisher: The New York Review of Books, Inc
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1681375001
• ISBN 13: 9781681375007
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136