Of Thorn and Wing

Valentine Penrose (trans. Mia X. Pérez)

The first English-language translation of the collected poems of Valentine Penrose, one of the earliest contributors to the Surrealist movement of the 1920s, and, in the words of Paul Éluard, “one of the most eminent French women poets.”

Though Penrose’s poetry partakes in the liberatory potential of Surrealist literary technique, her uniquely lucid automatism and incantatory lyricism deviated significantly from the movement’s typical imagery and theoretical modes. A rebel in every area of her life, Penrose refused to conform to any social or literary convention. Infusing her poems with arcane mysticism, sapphic eroticism, literary erudition, and revolutionary politics, Penrose challenges the signature gendered tropes of Surrealism like the femme-enfant and the passive female muse. Her poetry as well as her works of prose—such as the celebrated Gothic novel The Bloody Countess—depict a treacherous terrain of abstract subjective entanglement that perhaps bears closer resemblance to the works of nineteenth-century French Romantics than those of her peers. Increasingly crafted yet paradoxically and relentlessly mutable, Penrose’s poetry presents an alchemical labyrinth where one is no longer forced to suffer the distinction between subject and object, self and other.

“A calliope of spells infused with gemstone crystals, with tempestuous possibilities that ignite sans-mundane crystalogrify as tempest.”—Will Alexander