Floating Islands

Three works that bookend Joyce Mansour’s two decades of published fiction, including the first English translation of “Floating Islands”

“Floating Islands” is Joyce Mansour’s most personal and unsettling work of prose. Set almost entirely within a hospital in Geneva, it chronicles the slow collapse of boundaries between visitor and patient, authority and submission, imagination and extinction. What begins as an act of filial duty becomes an existential entrapment, as the narrator is absorbed into the institution’s rhythms and hierarchies.

Doctors and nurses embody a cruel vitality, their health weaponized against the dying. Patients drift through states of dependency, hallucination, and rage. Bodies leak, fail, and betray their owners, while language splinters under the pressure of describing what polite discourse refuses to name. Hospitals are also places for arrivals and departures, and it is where Mansour stages her own farewell: “Floating Islands” is her final work of narrative prose, one that marks an important shift in the author’s creative life, and where the source of her inspiration moves from looking inward to one looking outward.

Rooted in Surrealism yet strikingly contemporary, “Floating Islands” (1973) is collected here alongside Mansour’s earliest prose works “Julius Caesar” (1955) and “The Parrot” (1956), reading as both culmination and reckoning: a final confrontation with mortality, authorship, and the limits of imagination.

Joyce Mansour (1928–1986) was born in England to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt shortly after her birth, where she grew up among the English-speaking elite. After marrying a Francophone Egyptian, she learned to write in French and was forced into exile in Paris following the rise of Nasser. There, Mansour became one of the most uncompromising figures of the postwar Surrealist movement and the most significant poet to join the group after World War II, a close friend of André Breton and part of the movement’s inner circle. She authored sixteen books of poetry, as well as prose works and plays that confront desire, death, violence, and the female body with startling directness.

Emilie Moorhouse is a multidisciplinary writer, translator, and lecturer based in Montréal, Canada. Raised in a French-speaking household in Toronto, she holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Her previous translations include Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour (City Lights Books, 2023), longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Praise for Emilie Moorhouse’s translation of Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour

“I’m so grateful to Moorhouse for her helping bring this remarkable poet’s work to English readers, and help expand our knowledge of women writers throughout the world–helping buck against the historical chauvinism Mansour endured. I know my bookshelf will be better for it.”—Diana Arterian, LitHub‘s The Annotated Nightstand

“Emilie Moorhouse’s sharp, steamy translation of Syrian-Jewish poet Joyce Mansour … Surreal incarnations of raw female power–erotic, rageful–permeate.”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, LitHub

“This is a very welcome translation, one English readers can trust. Mansour should be far more read (in both French and English) than she is. Emilie Moorhouse has performed an invaluable service to her and to French literature in English.”—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, Cable Street

“It is high time (and way past it!) that someone bring to publishing daylight the truly great range of poems by the English/Egyptian writer artist/entertainer Joyce Patricia Adès, whom we salute as Joyce Mansour. Emilie Moorhouse has just accomplished this feat and we can gladly say, to this bilingual and welcome presentation of a large selection of those texts with City Lights, a very loud hooray!”—Mary Ann Caws, author of Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism: Selected Essays

“Among the many dark pleasures of Emerald Wounds, most marvelous is Joyce Mansour’s canny adaptation of the Surrealist impulse towards revolt to subversively femme ends. In Emilie Moorhouse’s astonishingly fresh translations, these palm-sized poems are arousing, alarming, and, finally, transformational, offering outlandish anti-psalms, sex tips from the devil, adroit instruction manuals for surviving the eradicating world. Like emeralds held so tightly they bite the flesh, these poems are compressed, brilliant works of maximum refulgence.”—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne

“This legendary Surrealist woman poet with her singular lyric fusion of love and death, phantasies of gleeful and grim inexorability, constructs radical strategies of irrational disjunction. …Translated with verve by Emilie Moorhouse.”—Norma Cole, author of Fate News

“Emerald Wounds feels like a resuscitation. Joyce Mansour’s Arab Jewish consciousness sticks its tongue out in the face of macho Euro mores. Given new breath by translator Emilie Moorhouse, Mansour’s work is phantastic, inverted, explicit, full of spells. It seems to predict and override the world’s weakening lust, calling out from a past of feverish slits, Sekhmet and the joy of piss.”—Tamara Faith Berger, author of Maidenhead

“A revelation and delight to see: a poet whose work still speaks with immediacy decades after she was alive. We love seeing the original language juxtaposed against the translation – here done superbly by Emilie Moorhouse. Brava to all.”—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, WA)

“This ardent, well-honed collection coaxes Mansour’s ‘molecules of revolt’ into jewel-bright, posthumous flares.”—Joyelle McSweeney, Full Stop

“Erotic, subversive, sensual, vivacious, defiant, fragile, satirical, ironic, lyrical, eruptive, heretical, anguished, sexy, and buoyant.”—Allan Graubard, Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Slippery, stained, and gloriously indelicate, Joyce Mansour reveals to us the grisly face of eros.”—Elaine Kahn, author of Women in Public

“Fierce, uncompromising, intelligent, weird, assertive, abject–Joyce Mansour’s poems are a long cry of female rage and desire. The world is ‘a shitting bird,’ the dead ‘bloom like Parma hams,’ and the patriarchy subverted, mocked, & challenged at every turn, in personal relationships with men, in the fatuous advice of women’s magazines. ‘I do not know hell,’ Mansour writes, ‘But my body has been burning ever since I was born.’ These poems are the searing result of that life.”—Kim Addonizio, author of Now We’re Getting Somewhere

“In Joyce Mansour’s exuberant, macabre, strange and sexy poems, I find such kinship, such lineage, such permission. It is such a delight to read this collection and meet her. These poems invite me to be brave, to be loud, to cackle and mourn and seduce. I only wish we’d met sooner, that I’d known sooner to place myself in her lineage.”—Safia Elhillo, author of Girls That Never Die

“Transgressive delight and terror of the supreme surreal feminist in this remarkable and most original book of dreams. Mansour, ‘an animal of the night,’ has been waiting to be reclaimed and counted. She who ‘prunes the sky with carnivorous thighs,’ who ruse lies in a chignon is wonderfully abetted in these excellent, luminous translations. A poet who listens to the ‘dialect of undressed sexes,’ and ‘pierces the stagnant eye of the night’ is the aligning, yet jolting force we’ve all been anticipating. This is her moment.”—Anne Waldman, author of Bard, Kinetic

“In the poetry of Joyce Mansour, we feel the churn of the devouring and excreting body and its parts. Each part emits parts: the lover births his sex; the receptive octopus outputs its legs like a burst seedpod. Vicious as childbirth, delicate as the tension in a throat about to speak, Mansour’s poems demand we attend to the forbidden maximums of our desires.”—Sophia Dahlin, author of Natch

“Sparse and elegant … shot through with blood and violence, and a fierce sexuality borne of a life veined with loss and exile.”—Susan Norton, Carmichael’s Bookstore (Louisville, KY)