Poetry is a forest filled with precious wonders—that was my view of things

(from “Symmetrical group of simultaneous emotions,” page 91)

Following the 2015 English translation of Sunny Girls, Paris-based Sandra Moussempès’s new release is a masterwork in abstract feminist poetry. Cassandra at point-blank range is an exciting new collection that is teeming with inspiration from a wide swath of historic feminine champions, as well as the everyday, film-like experiences of the poet herself. Translated with an astute attention to detail, and crisp, continuous tonality, Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy have offered us a glimpse into the amorphous and readily engaged mind of Moussempès across a patchwork of fever dream spaces, where reality twists and turns, and language is the cohesive element binding shared experience, necessary history, and the grim but defiant inquiry of conflict and resistance, together.

The time when ghosts emerge from every mirror
Like tree roots interlaced by a memory

(from “Language & pruning shears,” page 159)

Cassandra is far from a simple or easily approachable book. It is a trove of ideas, often swirling amongst each other. Each poem blends into the next. The poet contributes an idea, which is revisited across new source material and other inspiring contexts. The poet is the observer, is the watcher, is the witness, both by choice and circumstance. There is a power to this historic take on the poet as a seer and archivist of shared experience, alongside the reclaimed power of the voice of the woman poet and individual women brought into center collectively. And through every moment that moves beyond the figure, beyond the character, there are the graying peripheries of movement that fill time, fill space, and reveal a brittle, challenging landscape through which we all must travel. There is thus a subtext, literal and ethereal, of grimness, a necessary fabric of reality that sits between us. It is sordid, unkempt, and rough. It is difficult to accept, but in many cases must be sat through, moved through, burdened by.

Poetry is an idea of the black sky and
Red thoughts that disturb it
Speculation becomes a tentacle there

(from “Repainting a sentence fragment,” page 225)

And what of Cassandra? As an homage, a mirror, and a reference point, this figure sets the stage and remains alongside it throughout the book, as anchor and as amplifier. Cassandra, the mythic Trojan seer cursed by Apollo to speak the truth but never be believed, is a symbol of the poetry itself and the prophetic behavior of the poet whose writing must be cast across shadow and light. Vision and witness is hallucinatory as it becomes a multifaceted, singular voice. In this space, in this collection, poetry is where observation, memory, and defiance meet. Readers are gifted with an opportunity to move through the voice of Moussempès and emerge past difficulty and conflict into moments of reflection and growth. But the poet doesn’t force this change, is never didactic; we are instead pushed forward into her ether to explore on our own terms. Critically engaging, this is a feminist poetry that is as postmodern to the reader as it is confessional to the poet, as bound to time as it is widespread in its presentation.

Her face brightens as the dream progresses and ends up disappearing completely

(from “Downsizes models of red mirrors,” page 203)

The book contains a variety of sequences, opening up new layers of readability and making this a significant collection of Moussempès’s work. Each sequence contains up to 16 poems, and sequence titles include “Unidentified feminine objects,” “Symmetrical group of simultaneous emotions,” “Scissors & nighttime sky,” “Black pink face,” “House of liquid sentences,” “Cassandra at point-blank range,” “Soundscape at Venice Beach,” “Madness and veranda,” and “Spouses and decibel forms.” Cassandra may be emerging out of the French, but it has significant roots in the United States and other parts of Europe.

Many of the images from the book are derived from otherworldly times and places, which cascade across 2025 like a freshly opened archive. 70s-era California scenes and settings, potentially connected to and seemingly limitlessly embodying films from that era, dominate the poet’s channeling. Other feminist poetics from previous generations, including Shelley, Woolf, Plath, and Dickinson, are centered. And yet this centering is a phantasmagoria: images we may believe until they shapeshift, blend in and out of focus, enter and leave scene.

They are not ready to glisten in the void either or to move in their bikinis, to go over meters of thoughts between scalpeled memories and prefabricated psychic homes

(from “The cloister,” page 25)

A poignant sequence across hundreds of pages that crests with each page flip: a dreamlike vision of what the poet has observed, processed, and transformed into the purity and messiness of poetic thought. History, while not imposed upon the reader, is a real character within each poem, offering its own subtextual layers through which we may approach, learn, and grow.

Cassandra surprises us with how it presents each image, each idea, each person, in a way that fleets objectification. Reference points are fluid and in flux, mentions or allusions are real and brilliant while at the same time subtle and peripheral themselves. If we are to imagine the true form a historic, feminist collective takes, it moves away from solidity into the fragment of radical inclusion. Of course the book doesn’t tell us that and as I read it, I began a series of questions of myself, as a reader, as a learner, as one open to immersion and a personal fragmentation of being, identity, and readership.

I have entered into the spirit of the poem
That I covet
One minute later I am disarmed

(from “Process,” page 141)

Some of the most blinding moments are seemingly small phrases of transgression and contradiction that scatter across the book like a binding agent, a seasoning, or a blessing. Moussempès does not shy away from a blend of objectivist-style image making, quiet reflections, and loud observations. This range results in an intellectual spirit that holds the book together in a completely separate way; a series of logical arguments indicative of the poet’s own growth, that the poet herself isn’t objectified, neutral, or set in a fantasy space of stability.

This may be the most arresting quality of this collection, that the poet has been deconstructed by herself for herself, and for the reader. To what end? It takes a reading of the book to understand; but we are afforded an intimacy and privacy that are rarely normalized in the fictitious fancies of most contemporary poetry. We are given Moussempès, a poet who is a human being, whose life and works are composed in the realms of past and present human beings, who is as active in her exploration as we can be in ours.