Winner of the 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poems, France

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. Eastern European 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 bi-lingual, French/English edition, Ifland repeatedly turns to remembered images of her unnamed homeland to animate her unfamiliar home, creating, what poet Gary Young calls, in the Introduction, “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.”

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