Virginie Poitrasson’s debut poetry collection in English, The Unlikeness of Things, roves the territories where the ambiguities of perception brush up against the unspeakable, or even the fantastical. The writing opens onto a stark, startling, phenomenological field, in which the ordinary objects of everyday life participate fully in the ongoing formation and deformation of the self, and the body merges with its domestic surroundings, such that “fingers stiffen like wood” and a cup of tea is “steeped in… thoughts, traces of memories and halftone images.”
Inspired by the hauntingly enigmatic work of women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, and Dorothea Tanning, The Unlikeness of Things offers a precisely related series of small sensory epiphanies: hallucinations, strange visual impressions and experiences. In Michelle Noteboom’s deft translation, Poitrasson’s uncanny world comes to life in a subtly defamiliarized English—as what’s unalike flickers into likeness and back again. Boundaries and thresholds are constantly crossed: “What overflows here is not my flesh but my very presence.”
Michelle Noteboom
Virginie Poitrasson
Praise for The Unlikeness of Things
In Virginie Poitrasson’s The Unlikeness of Things, the terror of depersonalization alternates with the promise of new senses. “My body is no longer a border, I pour into a room.” Every border in this beautiful book is strained until it vibrates.
— Ben Lerner
Arthur Rimbaud claimed that the way to access poetry was through the “derangement of all the senses.” Virginie Poitrasson’s The Unlikeness of Things is an account of such sensory unruliness and the poetry it can produce. Here, though, it is the body itself, and not just the senses, that becomes deranged, disorganized, dysregulated, and that simultaneously resists language and inspires its supple flights. Translated with agility by Michelle Noteboom, this is a musical, vibrant, anxious, delicate, and devastating book.
— Lindsay Turner
Probing the extent of the self and the ways that body and mind intertwine with the rest of life, this extended phenomenological exploration finds uncommon fusions as well as instances of invisibility and complex modes of multiplicity. With all the senses on high alert, Poitrasson composes in acute detail, letting us enter a fusional world in which she affirms, “I am uncontainable in my flexibility.” Michelle Noteboom’s brilliant translation captures all the force of Poitrasson’s unique vision.
— Cole Swensen
