Photo by Didier Pruvot / Flammarion

What if we don’t read Sandra Moussempès’s eleventh published collection, Cassandra at Point-Blank Range (Flammarion/Diálogos Press, 2025), through the curation of a bilingual translation but, instead, how it lands outside what already exists?

Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy, both Americans living in France, embarked upon a bilingual version of Cassandre à bout portant, which won the prestigious Prix Théophile-Gautier de l’Académie française in 2022, connecting Moussempès’s fascination with the interior lives of many English-speaking women for an English readership.

With Moussempès’s influences of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Mary Shelley, and photographer Cindy Sherman, with Virginia Woolf and the lesser-known Gaspara Stampa, Unika Zürn, and Taeko Kono, alongside mythical figures like Lilith, Iphigenia, and Cassandra, this French poet’s mosaic of interests transcends and rebukes from a reclaimed vantage of historic neglect: “But the written voice stretches out in time / (words here and there thrown out with the bathwater)” (“A man’s choice”).

Does translation invariably lose liquid sentences like “the similarity of hair & intimate violence” for which Moussempès is known? Can we remove a person’s writing from their heritage and expect outsiders to comprehend cultural subtleties; expounding through fragments and utilizing absurd syntax, and omitting traditional prepositions and conjunctions—do they remain understood? Moussempès’s nonlyrical writing of the haunted aesthetics of women’s lives forges a jarring multilingualism that rejects a singular language, enabling ekphrasis over literalisms: “A phantom who was scared stiff before this contextual mirror / A heart-shaped mouth methodically inhaling the physiognomy of her double” (“Green Tree”).

The poem “Green Tree” is influenced by The Ice Storm, Ang Lee's 1997 film employing a subdued, almost hallucinatory style, alongside symbolic imagery. This nod to absurdism also conjoins surrealist influences, which equally fascinated one of Moussempès’s major heroes, the late filmmaker David Lynch. If you consider that his violent didactic filmography was intentionally underdescribed, Moussempès’s antistyle makes more sense: “In the country of bewitched kites know how to hold your work by its needle” (“Chopping house”).

Moussempès’s writing doesn’t enshrine women but traces their fates and contemplations, much as French surrealist/avant-garde cinema and Dada-influenced movements sought to evoke irrational imagery as a challenge to traditional narrative. Consider Moussempès’s deeper meaning then, especially with subtitles like “Unidentified feminine objects.” What saves this collection from a lack of connectivity is its creative body politic and feminist surrealism à la Leonora Carrington, whereby an artist explores female identity and agency as they reject the idea of being seen as an object, by creating their own objectivity. 

Moussempès’s poems speak of and to women, where the necessity of acute French or English expression is less important than the narration of women’s lives through the senses. As she says: “The secret allowed me to come and go fearlessly.” Translation is a practice that reworks something into another form of existence: “To my voice found in a recessed answering machine” (“Prosody of Welcome”). Moussempès has filled a void whose historic rigid exclusions of diversity and dictations that poetry should have strict formal structure canceled French poetry for many.

While women and people of color are underrepresented in French poetry, Moussempès’s writing rejects stifling former values without adopting new ones. Instead, she’s unburdened in an urge to speak without restraint, rule, or structure. At times, the language doesn’t really make conventional sense; this is deliberate. Don’t force understanding; the intention is to experience. In the poem “Doubles,” surrealism recalls Twin Peaks’s (1990) mirroring, shuffling effects, alongside Blue Velvet’s (1986) dissolution of femininity, with tinges of The Shining’s (1980) horror and the neon-blinking loss and gain of self in Jean-Claude Tramont’s All Night Long (1981).

The blond hostess waits for us           squirms on the mauve floor
All night long then all day                    curled up in a closed space

Or perhaps none of those references, each of us conjuring our own cultural artifact from the froth of Moussempès’s imagination. We may believe we understand what a “circumstantial mirror” represents, or we walk through a funhouse, losing reality, because it never existed. Moussempès is, arguably, fearless in her representation of everything and nothing, unafraid of judgment because her inner life of womanhood stands outside subjective canons of criticism. Angela Carter would appreciate her groomed violence and psychoanalytical references deeply; is it gestalt’s empty chair or just a chair?

Sitting back on an empty chair became a repetitive ritual
With a remorseful shovel to clean up the cage of omens (“Chair or dreams”)

Grasse, France