Ifland, Alta: Voice of Ice

Description

Les Figues Press, paperback

Publication Date: November 26, 2025

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Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice is a series of prose poems about the estranged self living outside of one’s native land and away from one’s native tongue. Romanian poet Alta Ifland writes first in French, then translates her work into English, before returning to the original French for further revisions, a process of linguistic reconciliation as much as translation.

Published in a bilingual, French–English edition, Ifland repeatedly turns to remembered images of her unnamed homeland to animate her unfamiliar home, creating, what poet Gary Young calls “a brilliant collection of prose poems document[ing] the quest for a coherent self, an authentic identity born out of the chaos of language and history.” He continues, “Ifland’s poems trace a radical process of de-creation—dismemberment of the body, dissolution of the ego, abandonment of the self—and the reinvention of a new identity, purified by the acid of tears. This new creation—tentative and rarified, ‘a child’s body of light’—earns a tenuous existence, but it proves to be enough to withstand the omnipresent threat of oblivion.”

Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice won the 2008 Prix Louis Guillaume du Poème en Prose/Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poetry.

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