Shapeshifter 

In a poem dedicated to her past lover Pablo Picasso, the poet and painter Alice Paalen Rahon (1904–1987) writes, “I’ve been living in a map on the wall. I think I am at the crossroads of the wind. I converse with it.” In many ways, hers was a life of shapeshifting and drifting. Born in France, Rahon was championed by André Breton and she was the first woman to be published in Editions Surréalistes in 1936. She would eventually leave Europe and settle in Mexico, where she helped introduce abstract expressionism. Rahon counted Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and Anaïs Nin among her friends.

Shapeshifter showcases a bilingual sampling from the three books of poetry Rahon published, with over half of the poems in this collection taken from her first published work, On Bare Earth (1936). It’s hard to not be swept away by Rahon’s dreamy and mystical visions of cosmogony: a madwoman with a mirror reigns over a desert of ash; a hobbling child travels from a town of “three hundred silver corpses”; a solar barque sails through a meadow of clouds. Like her paintings, Rahon’s poems are totemic in their imagery, pierced through by archetypal figures and elemental icons. Often, they are inspired by her artistic interests, by way of prehistoric petroglyphs or techniques such as sgraffito or Indigenous sandpainting. Yet at this unwavering intersection of poetry and painting, with “image going to its destiny,” Rahon still manages to focus on moments of “collapsible tenderness,” calligraphic flashes of former loves, childhood memories, as well as nostalgia for the many “Limbos of unborn springs.” 

Although Rahon is better remembered as a painter, in her translator’s introduction, Mary Ann Caws makes a strong case for Rahon’s poetry to be just as celebrated as that of her surrealist contemporaries. Despite her relatively small output, Rahon emerges as a poet who dazzlingly works “on the threshold of revelations written on the sand of dawn.”