Satisfied Sarcophagi

Joyce Mansour was born in England in 1928 to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt when she was still an infant. She grew up among the English-speaking elite of Egypt. Despite her privileged childhood, she was deeply scarred by the loss of her mother to cancer at 15 years old and the death of her first husband six months into their marriage, when she was just 18. She learned to speak and write in French when she married her second husband, a Francophone Egyptian, and was exiled to Paris when Nasser came to power. Mansour was part of the inner circle of Surrealists, a close friend of André Breton and the most significant poet to join the group after World War II. She wrote 16 books of poetry, as well as prose works and plays. She lived in Paris, France until her death in 1986 at age of 58.C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, The New England Review, and The Adroit Journal among others. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, appeared with World Poetry Books in 2024. She has been supported by fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She lives in Queens, New York.Garrett Caples has published four full-length poetry collections, most recently Lovers of Today (2021), a book of essays, Retrievals (2014), and a book of stories, Proses (2024). He's an editor at City Lights, where his titles include Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour (2023). He lives in San Francisco, CA.

Praise for Emerald Wounds by Joyce Mansour, translated from the French by Emilie Moorhouse:"Transgressive delight and terror of the supreme surreal feminist . . . A poet who listens to the 'dialect of undressed sexes,' and 'pierces the stagnant eye of the night' is the aligning, yet jolting force we've all been anticipating. This is her moment."—Anne Waldman, author of Fast-Speaking Woman"This legendary Surrealist woman poet with her singular lyric fusion of love and death, phantasies of gleeful and grim inexorability, constructs radical strategies of irrational disjunction."—Norma Cole, author of Alibi Lullaby"Slippery, stained, and gloriously indelicate, Joyce Mansour reveals to us the grisly face of eros."—Elaine Kahn, author of Women in Public"Mansour's tremendous voice still sparkles. She howls like a banshee, commanding orgasms and throbbing convulsions among the tombstones. Love is not a directive here. It's an obsession. Down the hatch, into the glittering maw we go, lost all the way down. It's time for a tryst, the reader and the sign, the symbol and its lust. Perhaps her words can offer a unifying cry, la petite mort, one that stands for more than simple desire. The kind of erotics that breaks us open instead of merely hollowing us out."—Grace Byron, Poetry Project Newsletter