About the Book
Winner of the Prix de Rome at Villa Médicis and the Théophile Gauthier Prize from the French Academy, Cassandra at point-blank range is the first full-length translation of revered French feminist poet Sandra Moussempès. Cassandra channels and weaves the voices of heroines including Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Mary Shelley, Cindy Sherman, Gaspara Stampa, Virginia Woolf, Unika Zürn, and Taeko Kono, as well as mythical figures like Lilith, Iphigenia, and Cassandra, to explore the depth of the Western feminine psyche. Through Moussempès' imagistic, layered poetics, readers encounter the corporality of being a woman among women and of making poetry with women, a process that this edition, translated by Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy, continues by "giving body" to Moussempès' work in English.
From the Translators' Note:
Raw and rigorous, Moussempès' approach to language, which rejects poetry as a precious world and sees it rather as an empowering universe, is ever more essential in today's world and in English. Through her words, women can coin themselves and their own reality. As allies in the endeavor, we have translated her text in minding this promise to women's voices.
Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy
Paris, February 2025
About the Author :
Sandra Moussempès was born in 1965 in Paris. She is the author of 14 books, most recently Sauvons l'ennemie (Flammarion 2025), Fréquence Mulholland (Éditions MF 2023), Cassandre à bout pourtant (Flammarion 2021), Cinéma de l'affect (Boucles de voix off pour film fantôme) (Éditions de l'Attente 2020), Colloque des télépathes & CD Post-Gradiva (Éditions de l'Attente 2017), and Sunny girls (Poésie/Flammarion 2015). She was the recipient of Prix de Rome at Villa Médicis, Rome, and the Théophile Gauthier Prize from the French Academy for Cassandre à bout portant. Her poetry engages with tensions felt by the somatic and psychic mind, the cinematic and haunted image, the void and distension of femininity, and the multi-vocal and isolated narrative, to name a few. Additionally, a performance artist, she uses her sung voice to give atmosphere to her readings, summoning a form of hypnosis. She has released four sound poetry albums and has performed at many venues and festivals, including the Centre Pompidou, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, MAMCO in Geneva, and the University of Cambridge. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou International Prize for Literature. She regularly facilitates creative writing workshops at universities, in art schools, or in middle schools in low-income neighborhoods. She lives in Paris and is the mother of a son. Carrie Chappell is the author of Loving Tallulah Bankhead (Paris Heretics 2022) and Quarantine Daybook (Bottlecap Press 2021). Some of her recent poems have been published in Birdcoat Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Nashville Review, Redivider, and SWIMM, and her essays have previously appeared in DIAGRAM, Fanzine, New Delta Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, The Rupture, and Xavier Review. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans' Creative Writing Workshop and, presently, teaches English as a Foreign Language at Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM). Each spring, she curates Verse of April, of which she is the founder, and one of her newest ventures is writing Spiritual Material: Musings from My Second-Hand, Parisian Wardrobe, which she hosts via Substack. As a current doctoral student in French Literature at CY Cergy Paris University, Carrie is working on a research-creation project around the poetic novels of Hélène Bessette. Dr. Amanda Murphy is Associate Professor of English and Translation Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and specializes in experimental literature and its translation. Her publications include articles on authors such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Katalin Molnár, and Raymond Federman and the monograph Écrire, lire, traduire entre les langues: défis et pratiques de la poétique multilingue (Reading, Writing, Translating: Challenges and Practices of Multilingual Writing), Classiques Garnier, 2023. She has also published literary critiques in En attendant Nadeau and translated works of literary criticism including Borges by Julio Premat (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021).
Review :
"From within the galaxy of French poetics, Sandra Moussempès' work glimmers like the foreign body of a rare star...."
-Liliane Giraudon, Author of Love Is Colder than the Lake and Sphinx
"There is something almost oceanic and tidal about the work of Sandra Moussempès. The formal expansion and contraction seems to mold to the way the theme of female embodiment runs across these poems."
-Marissa Davis, Author of End of Empire and My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak
