Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2025. 160 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1-68571-300-3. DOI: 10.53288/0589.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $17.00 in print: paperbound/4.25 X 9.25 in.

In transplanting her painterly European sensibility into an American poetic context, Alta Ifland creates and redreams the hauntingly surreal emotional landscapes of dislocation, desolate distances, and Redonesque disjuncture from which she shapes these ever-shifting, mad-and-mythic excursions—in voices awed, childlike, sardonic, she startles and disturbs, charms and exalts.

~ Wanda Coleman, author of Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors, Mercurochrome, and The Riot Inside Me: More Trials and Tremors

Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice

Imprint:

by Alta Ifland

Contributors John Taylor

Published: 11/26/2025

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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.

This title is a second revised and expanded edition with a new introduction by John Taylor, released as part of punctum’s Special Collections project.

About the First Edition

About the Author

Born and raised in Communist Romania, Alta Ifland came to the US as a political refugee in 1991, where she obtained a PhD in French language and literature. Ifland’s other works include a book of prose poems, The Snail’s Song (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011), which includes her original drawings, and two books of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World (Ninebark Press, 2010) and Death-in-a-Box (Subito Press, 2010). Ifland’s novels, The Wife Who Wasn’t and Speaking to No. 4 were published by New Europe Books in 2021 and 2022. Her latest published work, an atypical historical novel (written entirely as a dialogue), Two Queens and a Chronicler, is forthcoming in October 2025 from Open Ends Press. Ifland’s writings have been translated into French, Romanian and Russian. After living for 30 years in the US—Florida, Arizona, and California—Ifland now lives in France.

John Taylor is an American writer, poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, and Modern Greek), he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. His recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Charline Lambert, Veroniki Dalakoura, Béatrice Douvre, and Franca Mancinelli. His own books of poetry and poetic prose include Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (Bitter Oleander Press, 2018), A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges (Odd Volumes, 2019), a “double book” co-authored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, and What Comes from the Night (Coyote Arts, 2024).