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< BACK I Am a Beautiful Monster Poetry, Prose, and Provocation Francis Picabia Translated by Marc Lowenthal Endorsements"This is a brilliant translation of Picabia's delightfully insufferable poetry. Witty, banal, explosive, aphoristic, and articulate, his deployment of source texts, collage, appropriation, and pastiche provide further proof that techniques often called postmodernist were fundamental to modernism."—David Antin "Picabia's manifestos, essays, and poems, well known in France, are presented here for the first time in a complete English edition, ably translated and annotated by Marc Lowenthal. From the early exuberant poems in Fifty-Two Mirrors to his erotically charged Thoughts without Language, to his 'Cannibal' manifesto and Surrealist screenplays, Picabia's writings constitute a fascinating chapter in the history of the avant-garde." —Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English, Stanford University, and author of The Futurist Movement and Radical Artifice "Francis Picabia's raucous early Dada poems dare the unprecedented and traffic in the sheer possibilities of abstract shimmering gesture. His late aphorisms are startling bolts of congealed thought. Marc Lowenthal has done the history of radical modernist poetry a great service by bringing these works of exquisitely offbeat taste and intoxicating élan into English. His translations of the turbulent work of this 'freeloading angel' show uncanny skill and welcome verve." —Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania "Like a number of other modernist masters—Schwitters, Arp, Picasso, Kandinsky—Picabia's reputation as an artist has long overshadowed, even hidden, his more than equal achievement as a writer and poet. Now, in Marc Lowenthal's masterful re-creation, the secret is finally out. Picabia emerges here full-blown among his contemporaries and as a forerunner to the most adventurous poets of our own time. Beautiful and monstrous by turns, the artist and his works are a testament to what happens when a poet creates up to and including his limits—and ours." —Jerome Rothenberg, Poet |
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