Rediscover Joyce Mansour, the most significant Surrealist poet to emerge from 1950s Paris.“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.”—André BretonJoyce 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 of André Breton, who welcom...

This foundational volume presents the first comprehensive English-language excavation of Joyce's life and work. Beyond mere biography, it is a genealogical hermeneutics of the imaginary that maps the terrain of a poet whose writing became an ontological refusal. Joyce, André Breton's "Tuberose Baby Girl" , transfigured her Egyptian-Jewish lineage and subsequent political exile from Cairo into a radical poetic autonomy. Her language, forged in the crucible of loss and desir...

Joyce Mansour fut l'une des dernières grandes figures du surréalisme: séduisante et secrète, scandaleuse et touchante, elle fascina tous ceux qui, de près ou de loin, participèrent à la dernière période du mouvement. Mais elle fut aussi, et surtout, l'une des voix les plus originales qu'ait donné à entendre le surréalisme d'après-guerre. Saluée par Breton, Michaux, Mandiargues ou Leiris, son œuvre reconduit l'expression tourmentée du désir par-delà la frontière des genres; elle en déploie ...

Leonora Carrington meets Georges Bataille in these outlandish surrealist tales."Mansour saw in the erotic the possibilities for individual and collective freedom. Inside the void, a reimagining of the self and the world can occur, illuminating new ways to live that contrast with the default world of the everyday."—Ama Kwarteng, Los Angeles Review of BooksEgyptian exile Joyce Mansour was one of the most important writers to join And...