The Unlikeness of Things

Author: Virginie Poitrasson

Translator: Michelle Noteboom

Publisher: Litmus Press (2025)

Virginie Poitrasson’s debut poetry collection in English, The Unlikeness of Things,roves the territories where the ambiguities of perception brush up against the unspeakable, or even the fantastical. The writing opens onto a stark, startling, phenomenological field, in which the ordinary objects of everyday life participate fully in the ongoing formation and deformation of the self, and the body merges with its domestic surroundings, such that “fingers stiffen like wood” and a cup of tea is “steeped in… thoughts, traces of memories and halftone images.”

Inspired by the hauntingly enigmatic work of women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, and Dorothea Tanning, The Unlikeness of Thingsoffers a precisely related series of small sensory epiphanies: hallucinations, strange visual impressions and experiences. In Michelle Noteboom’s deft translation, Poitrasson’s uncanny world comes to life in a subtly defamiliarized English—as what’s unalike flickers into likeness and back again. Boundaries and thresholds are constantly crossed: “What overflows here is not my flesh but my very presence.”