I, Nadja, and Other Poems

Susan Elmslie’s lyrically powerful debut, I, Nadja, and Other Poems, is the story of how a flesh and blood woman with desires, dreams and daring was transformed into the sphinx of André Breton’s surrealist romance, Nadja. The real Nadja was, of course, so much more than just a symbol. Elmslie struggles against “the slenderness of forgetting” in these furious and captivating pages, and the narrative flows out from Nadja’s confessions and becomes the story of all kinds of mothers, daughters, friends, and heroines. This is a book of diminishment, fearlessness and celebration, poetry at its most truthful and intense.