Little Wet-Paint Girl
- Publisher
- Athabasca University Press
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2022
- Subjects
- Canadian
- Categories
- Author lives in Quebec
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eBook
- ISBN
- 9781771993739
- Publish Date
- Oct 2022
- List Price
- $21.99
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Description
Born to a French-Canadian mother and Algerian father, Ouanessa Younsi is a bold and unique voice in modern Francophone poetry. In this intensely personal recitation on identity and ethnicity, Younsi takes the reader on a surreal odyssey through a liminal world of belonging and unbelonging, absence and presence, mind and body. Her visionary work, first published in French and translated here by Rebecca Thompson, is unsettling, riveting and guaranteed to leave readers contemplating the existential mysteries of “self.”
About the authors
Ouanessa Younsi is a poet, psychiatrist, and lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal. She is the author of three books of poetry in French, Prendre langue (2011), Emprunter aux oiseaux (2014), Soigner, aimer (2016), and Métissée (2018).
Ouanessa Younsi's profile page
Rebecca L. Thompson holds a PhD in literature, with a focus on translation studies and works as an adjunct professor at State University of New York at Fredonia. Her translation work has appeared in Metamorphoses and Modern Poetry in Translation.
Excerpt: Little Wet-Paint Girl (by (author) Ouanessa Younsi; translated by Rebecca L. Thompson)
Among tall grass and wasps, I didn’t know the wind was an hourglass. My innocence amused the woman next door. Her delight planted watermelons, pink mouthfuls amidst famine. We rescued different species, different riddles:
Why does September make you thirsty?
Once born, who stays behind?
The neighbor woman was a theater.
We grew older, and I lost her by losing myself.
Editorial Reviews
"Little Wet-Paint Girl unfolds as scenes from a waking fever dream. Unreality and reality blend; images of dismemberment, harm, transformation haunt the narrator’s search. Themes of longing for belonging, searching for identity, safe home from a voice with Algerian roots on Montréal soil. Younsi’s voice is distinctive and strong and she approaches themes of rootedness, family, dispossession and race in a visceral and contemporary way." —Sonnet L’Abbé
"In Little Wet-Paint Girl, Younsi explores the mysteries of identity, existence, and the porous contours of the thing we call ‘self,’ in a most original and profoundly moving way. Elements of the uncanny, fantastic, grotesque, absurdist, surreal, and gothic combine into a visionary work that is both unsettling and riveting in the alternate world it establishes. Breathtaking, emotionally complex, precise." —Christine Wiesenthal