[11/09/26] Penrose, Valentine: Of Thorn and Wing

World Poetry, paperback

Translated by Mia X. Pérez & Felicity Gee

Publication Date: November 9, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

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 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 subjective entanglement that 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.

“This riveting translation of Valentine Penrose’s stylishly surreal, lyrically rich, and politically conscious poems captures the tonal and pastoral elegance one also finds in Éluard’s poetry, unveiling a vibrantly ecological world. Influenced by Sappho and Indian culture, her bucolic universe unfolds like a banquet of binary impulses—male and female, open and closed, plant and fire, day and night—all converging in the pistil of time.” —Vi Khi Nao

“True to her Capricorn nature, Penrose’s poems balance earthly pleasure with oceanic depth, refracted anew through Pérez’s translation of this scintillating body of work. Her Sapphic erotics blend stone and leaf, subject and object, in exchanges of ecstatic creation: ‘I spun you you wove me.’ These poems will see you singing like water and weeping stars. —Rebecca Hawkes

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

“Penrose cultivates gardens of lexical delight. The lush flora of her imagery surges forth from her gentle manipulation of roots, both budding shoots and linguistic seeds, in poems that draw breath alongside Chrétien de Troyes or Marguerite de Navarre as much as Paul Éluard or André Breton. Mia X. Pérez has carefully coaxed these poems from the soil with a keen eye and a green thumb.” —Chris Clarke

“Through her precise, elegant translations—sensitive to the strange intelligence of these poems—Mia X. Pérez illuminates for readers in English the work of a necessary French poet.” —Nathan Brown

“I love these poems.” —Paul Éluard