Valentine Penrose - Of Thorn and Wing
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Bilingual Edition
November 9, 2026
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
Valentine Penrose
Of Thorn and Wing
Translated from French by
MIA X. PÉREZ
Introduction by
FELICITY GEE
The first English-language translation of the collected poems of Valentine Penrose, one of the earliest contributors to the Surrealist movement of the 1920s, and, in the words of Paul Éluard, “one of the most eminent French women poets.”
Though Penrose’s poetry partakes in the liberatory potential of Surrealist literary technique, her uniquely lucid automatism and incantatory lyricism deviated significantly from the movement’s typical imagery and theoretical modes. A rebel in every area of her life, Penrose refused to conform to any social or literary convention. Infusing her poems with arcane mysticism, sapphic eroticism, literary erudition, and revolutionary politics, Penrose challenges the signature gendered tropes of Surrealism like the femme-enfant and the passive female muse. Her poetry as well as her works of prose—such as the celebrated Gothic novel The Bloody Countess—depict a treacherous terrain of abstract subjective entanglement that perhaps bears closer resemblance to the works of nineteenth-century French Romantics than those of her peers. Increasingly crafted yet paradoxically and relentlessly mutable, Penrose’s poetry presents an alchemical labyrinth where one is no longer forced to suffer the distinction between subject and object, self and other.
“A calliope of spells infused with gemstone crystals, with tempestuous possibilities that ignite sans-mundane crystalogrify as tempest.” —Will Alexander
“A poet whose importance greatly surpasses her notoriety.” —Adam Biro, Dictionnaire général du Surréalisme
“[Penrose’s] poems, if hermetic, never seek to impose on the reader by way of those predictably daring images which make so much surrealist poetry tedious.” —Charles Tomlinson, PN Review
“I love these poems.” —Paul Éluard
VALENTINE PENROSE (1898–1978) was born in Mont-de-Marsan, France to a bourgeois military family. Disinterested in conforming to any social convention, Penrose immersed herself in bohemian circles from a young age. Commonly celebrated as the first woman to publish Surrealist poetry, Penrose’s poems are distinguished by their intertextuality and anachronism, shaped by her lifelong studies in eastern philosophies, medieval history, and magical practice. Restless in the tame suburbs of France and England, she frequently traveled abroad, with long stays in India. She joined the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War and was stationed with French forces in Algiers during WWII. Perhaps best known for the unapologetically queer 1951 gothic novel The Bloody Countess, Penrose authored several works of poetry, prose, and collage before passing away on Farley Farm, the artist commune run by ex-husband Roland Penrose and his second wife Lee Miller.
MIA X. PÉREZ is a writer, editor, and translator from Seattle, Washington. Their work has been published in The Brooklyn Review, Milk Press, AGON, Black Sun Lit, among others. Currently a PhD student of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY, their research focuses on Romanticism, ecological thought, and the aesthetics of decay. Valentine Penrose’s complete poems, Of Thorn and Wing, is their first book of translation.
FELICITY GEE is the author of Magic Realism, World Cinema, and the Avant-Garde (Routledge) and has published extensively on surrealism, women artists, film and affect theory, including essays on Raúl Ruiz, Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, Jean Cocteau, Kōbō Abe, Angela Carter, and Fredric Jameson. She edited the scholarly volume Valentine Penrose: Surrealist, Poet, Artist, Voyager (Bloomsbury). From 2023 to 2025, Gee was President of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, and currently serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Surrealism. She is Associate Professor of Modernist Literatures and Avant-Garde Studies at the University of Exeter and her current project is a comparative study of women artists and writers of the modernist period and the architectural body.
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