Shapeshifter

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. Her first husband was the artist Wolfgang Paalen, among her lovers were Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose, and over the years her circle of friends included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. This bilingual edition of Rahon’s poems confirms the achievement of this little-known but visionary writer who defies categorization. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness. For the first time in any language, this book gathers the three collections of poetry Rahon published in her lifetime, along with uncollected and unpublished poems and an album of portraits, manuscript pages, and artworks.

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. 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, André Breton, René Char, Robert Desnos, and Paul Éluard. She lives in New York.