Soul House

Mireille Gansel (trans. Joan Seliger Sidney)

In the first book of her poetry to appear in English, acclaimed French-Jewish poet, translator, and translation-theorist Mireille Gansel crisscrosses time and extends hospitality to exiled poets and peoples in her quest to recreate a lost literary and spiritual home.

Gansel opens this meditative volume of prose poems with an epigraph from Gaston Bachelard: 'against all odds, the house invites us to say: I will be a citizen of the world despite the world.' In these war-torn days of refugees fleeing to Europe, Gansel strives to describe what we have in common, creating a crossroads of people, places, and languages she has loved. For Gansel, a poet rebuilding her 'Soul House,' every word is a building block. At the same time that she welcomes the stranger to her lost house, poetry is her weapon – "these migrant poems from all languages, these smuggled words that no border can stop" – with which to fight persecution and exile. In her review of the French edition, Sophie Ehrsam wrote, "The 'Soul House' is anything that harbors a glimmer, a hope, including an open door or an outstretched hand."