Soul House

In the first of her poetry books to appear in English, acclaimed French-Jewish poet, translator, and translation-theorist Mireille Gansel crisscrosses time and extends hospitality to exiled poets and peoples in her quest to recreate a lost literary and spiritual home. Gansel opens this meditative volume of 53 prose poems with an epigraph from Gaston Bachelard: ''against all odds, the house invites us to say: I will be a citizen of the world despite the world.'' In these war-torn days of refugees fleeing to Europe, Gansel strives to describe what we have in common, creating a crossroads of people, places, and languages she has loved. For Gansel, a poet rebuilding her ''soul house,'' every word is a building block. At the same time that she welcomes the stranger to her lost house, poetry is her weapon -- ''these migrant poems from all languages, these smuggled words that no border can stop'' -- with which to fight persecution and exile. Sophie Ehrsam wrote, ''The ''soul house'' is anything that harbors a glimmer, a hope, including an open door or an outstretched hand.''