Released October 31st, 2024 // 76 pages // 978-1-916938-50-2 // RRP: £12.99
Francofilaments by Eileen G'Sell is a poetic exploration of the intersections between Francophilia, feminism, and cinema. Informed by her work as a culture critic, the collection is marked by a blend of sharp wit, inventive wordplay, and a candid voice that traverses themes of desire, sex, and loss. G'Sell's poems move with a rhythmic, almost cinematic quality, conjuring vivid imagery and unexpected juxtapositions that invite the reader into a world where the everyday and the extraordinary coalesce. With a deft hand, she captures the nuanced interplay of language, identity, and the ever-present allure of French culture, offering a fresh perspective on what it means to navigate modern womanhood.
PRAISE for Francofilaments:
Like an array of confections in a patisserie window, the beguilingly vibrant, compact poems in G’Sell’s Francofilaments are as meticulously constructed as they are full of surprises. What appear at first like the breezy escapades of a playgirl flâneuse quickly reveal layers of complication and conflict embedded in the artifice, reminding us that chic derives from the German for ‘skill,’ glamour has roots in occult practice, and any pretty little thing might harbor ‘more Annabel Lee than Lady Dior’ at heart. But just as ‘escapism, however tenuous, proves / the only recourse to agency,’ it’s by means of G’Sell’s exquisite, signature spellwork on the page—her own ‘gold // beaded swagger, velvet strut’—and the sheer aplomb with which she handles every turn (of phrase, of thought, and of line) that the poet comes to perform, and thereby possess, ‘who she is / till she’s nobody else.’
— Timothy Donnelly
Francofilaments traces the intersecting webs of Francophilia, feminism and film with delicate precision and humor: ‘I tread, bragging about how close I was / to ghosting all the Frenchmen and Frenching / all the ghosts’. G’Sell’s poems blend pirouetting wordplay, frank address and invention in a way that is unexpected and illuminating.
— Matthea Harvey
Glorious in its swagger and seduction, Francofilaments invited me to reimagine who I could be in this world once again as a woman and a poet—hop a plane back to Paris, be a flâneuse, to say ‘I’ve gone fugitive too,’ to be reckless again, obstinate in the pursuit of pleasure, to claim for myself the moment of the poem when ‘The cathedral meets my gaze, and says, ‘you are my cathedral.’’ I want to walk the boulevards with the woman, all the women, in these poems, but also to be her, a woman who ‘straddles, stuns, and smirks at the world’, a little bit of Jean Seberg, Claire Danes, Agnès Varda—dare I say a little bit of Tina Turner, even, with her ‘gold/beaded swagger, velvet strut eye full/ of bicep flexed for the sky’. Here are poems so full of mischief, wit, intelligence, and the snap of her indefatigable self. G’Sell offers the reader so many ways to create and discover a home within oneself. I came away wanting it all.
— Heather Derr-Smith
Reading Francofilaments was like being swept through the streets of Paris at night, the clack of your interloper’s heels matching the precision of her thought. Nonchalant, philosophical, and painfully comical, she observes French film in the same breath as household objects, as casual and haphazard as sex. Once, she didn’t off herself because she got a ticket to Isabelle Huppert. We are all glad for it.
— Laura Broadbent
The hard gloss of a ballet studio mirror and mirrorlike museum glass: light, luxury, longing, surfaces, glimpses, and glints. Against the curated, heightened backdrop of French cinema, in Francofilaments the self, smudged, relishes and yearns. Here poems are rooms with tousled sheets, poems sharpened with rouge, crimson, and cerise, dense with sounds dropping and sliding and tangling together. The poems in this book are like an afternoon so beautiful it hurts, like the acidic flush of pleasure of a twisted lemon peel, of lemon seeping into a cut you didn’t know you had. The rooms of these poems, as G’Sell writes, ‘Seek out pleasure until pleasure itself becomes sad...’
— Emily Bludsworth de Barrios
I encountered a voice incisive and clever and was reminded of an English word borrowed from French: chatoyant, meaning: having a luster like that of a cat’s eye at night. The verse deepens to reveal prisms and multichromatic facets. The many loanwords English adopts from French shimmer with the significance of duality. Formally fine-tuned, often in couplets, G’Sell’s clean lines are time and again turned to evoke surprise. Full focus falls on each word—words marked by intently stinging, lush beauty.
— Mary-Alice Daniel
Think of these filaments as a fine and unrelenting rain (a summer rain, a ‘lower-cased’ rain) falling slantwise against the bare shoulders of a woman as she breezes through the city, and you trailing just behind, picking up coins and wrappers or whatever treasures she happens to drop from her open palms. Though she continuously charms and then eludes you, still with a wink she might suddenly turn on her heel to assure you—there is indeed ‘no need to touch in order to grasp’ her.
— Stella Corso
To read Eileen G'Sell's cinematic collection is to experience the specificity of memory even when the remembering is not our own. These poems—highly stylized, sharply sensual, "bitter and perfect"—gaze into French films and luminaries as if into sparkling, full length ("feature length") mirrors. With sequins and pigeons, pretzels and wine, as we traverse this book, we witness a seductive yet frightening inversion of our own interiority in these towering figures, in these syntactically intriguing lines. "I understood little and loved it all," writes G'Sell; this poet is unapologetically debonair, constantly making "a bet with the moon / that anyone can mimic a free spirit / in a flowy skirt."
— Cass Donish
ABOUT Eileen G'Sell:
Eileen G’Sell is an American poet and film critic with recent contributions to Poetry, Oversound, Hyperallergic, Harp and Altar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jacobin, The Baffler, The Art Newspaper, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Hopkins Review. Her first volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published by Gold Wake Press in 2018. In 2023, she received the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism. Her first book of nonfiction, Lipstick, will join Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2025. She teaches writing and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
