How to satisfy my craze for freshness? a line from In The Glittering Maw by the late Joyce Mansour, translated from French by C. Francis Fisher. This question echoes my own craze for exhilarating language that inflames and salves a need to scream. Mansour answers with a deluge of corporeal derangement. Her poems have scented my summer with "inflamed pistils and junky wounds."

Published this year by World Poetry, the poems in Maw span from 1960 to 1981. Her work is having a niche resurgence in the English speaking world while most of her books are out-of-print globally. I hope this renewed focus on her spreads to other geographies, as Mansour's erotic and violent use of the surreal, influential in her time, is a cultural strategy with which to face contemporary experience of disaster. Art and writing give form to madness, surrealism gives it a style. 

Her diction is wily and brutal, baroque and grotesque, calling to mind Wanda Coleman and Joyelle McSweeney. Exile, orgasm, and grief are delivered in a sensorially jacked freeverse. Every line is capitalized and abrupt, creating a serrated texture on the page. In the decade before her passing of breast cancer, her writing swells into a raging, psychoactive tirade. In her twelve page poem "The Great Never, " Mansour wields a death wish and a hardon like a javelin: 

Give me a piece of coal
I'll make a blind man out of it
Give me a skull scattered on the floor
I will make it a beacon descending
Into the pit of lasting passion 
Give me a mammary castle 
I will plunge headlong laughing at suicide 
Into the green hairnet of an October night
Give me a speck of dust 
I will make it a mountain of hate 
Tottering and carving a mystery 
To bury you

A voice of rage and hate speaks throughout, directed at the reader, at the mother figures, war machines, etc. This rage is threaded with an extreme desire for physical enmeshment, a fucking so complete it putrefies. 

Mansour's poems liquify and reform the body. Her presentation of sex organs has been interpreted as androgynous by scholar Victoria Carruthers in this diligent essay. I read Mansour's treatment of the body as non-humanist, rendering cock and pussy into creatures or even amoebic material-intercourse as a portal past the human limits of the body and into the surreal. The recurring image of semen doesn't consistently emerge from a male lover but from birds or plants, as in "Desire for Endless Desire":

It is hard for me to think of death
When large birds hesitate on my stomach
With slow pale sperm 
And foamy capacities

Later in the poem, she writes: 

Spintering and tearing of the vaginal spasm 
We must thwart the hangman 
Swallow his tongue
I feel a pain throb 
In my tailbone
I would like to sink pensively into the white cream of your arteries. 
To slide my naked hand along the moist spine of your corrola
To tame your coppery plant with barbarous snowcones
I am the maelstrom of Gomorrah. 

Here, arterial cream and a flower's corral are erotic images just outside the realm of human sexuality. Her imagery is not tethered to species or gender. The humanist idea of "Man" is deranged. Her poetics explode eroticism beyond lovemaking into other experiences of overwhelm. 

Mansour's career began in her twenties, writing among the Egyptian Surrealists. She described her process during this time as such: "Everything came out like a scream. I didn't take myself very seriously. For me it was a way of getting it all out because of rage and vengeance. To get the bad blood out. It became the transformation of a problem." Transformation, a boiling of human problems in a visceral, talasmatic substance, is the labor of Mansour's poem. 

She was raised among the Francophone elite in a Sephardic Jewish household, bumping elbows with King Farouk. Traveling with her second husband, a banker, she split her time between Cairo and Paris. In 1956, Gamal Nasser took power and nationalized the Suez Canal from British control, in part as a response to the Israeli colonial-project. No matter their indigeneity to Egypt, Jewish people were labeled as Zionists by the state and damned either to concentration camps or exile. Mansour fled to Paris, her wealth and Francophone status cushioning her landing. While she wrote against a bourgeois backdrop, her poems quake with rage and disaster, as in "666":

Listen
My song rolls towards exile 
I have to vomit 
In the pure air and clarity 
Of your mouth 
Do you see the barges that carry my blood 
Through the Spanish carpet
To Onan

Her permanent move to Paris sealed her status as a peer of the French Surrealists. She shared the school's investment in free association. Sometimes her imagery indulges in a whimsy characteristic to Surrealism that I find limp and distracting compared to her otherwise ferocious voice. Translator Fisher says, "Conventional Surrealism wasn't interested in the corporeal since it existed in a dreamlike, disembodied state." The intersection of the French Surrealists with psychoanalysis created more lofty, self-conscious work, while Mansour's multivalent identity and style generates an "I" unburdened by the psychoanalytic paternalism of the white male voice. Her "I" splits, engorges into a commanding titan or shrinks to the size of a rat in a Parisian gutter. 

Her style was revered and exoticized by her close friend, André Breton, who was invested in, according to Carruthers, "the subversive potential of the 'Orient,' specifically Egypt, as the source of a 'new myth' capable of 'liquidating' the dominance of Western rationalism." According to Francis, a similar eroticization has helped facilitate her resurgence in the US: "an over-exotification can happen, like, 'Oh, this is so interesting, she's a Jewish Arab'; these are the terms that we sell things in now." Mansour's experience of exile, imperialism, sexism, and wealth is all present within the book but any reader hoping for a salient perspective based in her identity will be disappointed. Mansour can't be pinned into a didactically ethnic or gendered voice. Her poems use the language of screaming to write about corporeal disaster. This style is used to capture the grotesqueness of war throughout the book, but especially in "The Breastplate,"

Nurses gloved in skin 
Will wage in the soft liquid of human life
And the dying will burn
Like castles of straw
The colonnades will sink 
The stars will bleat
Even woolen slacks will vanish
Without the giant space of fear 
And I'll rinse my bare teeth purple with dithyrambic ecstasy
Generous hysterics
When war begins to rain on the swell and on the beaches
I will go to meet him armed with my face
Coiffed with a heavy sob 

The sob of war is an adornment, a "coiff." Later in the poem she writes, "I will stick to the rubble / Life of a tuft of hair on a nude," again evoking hair and style. When a scream is alchemized into poetry, it becomes style and device. It is the dab of pubic hair in a painting, gauzing over the angry, fragrant redness of a sex. Is this act of craft a sanitizing?

As I write my own poems about disaster against a western, middle-class backdrop, the implications of my reach for the surreal plague me. I wrestle an anxiety about decorating despair, fearing the aestheticizing of violence I don't understand. Fargo Tbakhi writes in his essay Notes on Craft, "We believe our words sharper than they turn out to be. We play with toy hammers and think we can break own concrete. We think a spoon is a saw." And yet the poems get written, with or without their teeth. 

I didn't find pacification or prescription in Glittering Maw. But for any artist suffering to put their scream on the page, the screen, the canvas, there is much to learn from Mansour. She breathes dreams into the gun barrel. She does it with bruising impact and precision, with luscious eroticism. She straddles ecstatic and apocalyptic rapture. She provides no answers but instead a scream that electrified. To the end of what poem or street corner or revolt will this bolt send you?

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Charlie Stuip is a poet and filmmaker from Oakland, CA with work on Spectra Poets, NoBudge, Swamp Spit, and No More Prostitutes.