The Loveliest Vowel Empties

From her surrealist beginnings in Paris with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim developed into a completely independent, incomparable artist who has enjoyed lasting international fame. Like her paintings, her poems are part of the most vivid legacy of the 20th century. This volume contains her poems, plus a number of texts by Meret Oppenheim that shed more light on her world and the setting of her poems: the draft for a film script about Kaspar Hauser, Meret Oppenheim's description of her »Dinner on a Naked Woman«, a spring festival, and a conversation with the editor about the friendship between Bettine von Arnim and Karoline von Günderode.

»The singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated … the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.« Gary Indiana, The Village Voice

»A true delight« Mary Ann Caws

»I am in awe of Meret Oppenheim's poems, a seismic force heretofore unknown to me. Her aesthetic compatriots include Alejandra Pizarnik, Georg Trakl, Max Jacob, and Paul Celan—artists of deep symbol, deep void. ... To read Oppenheim's lyric bulletins ... is to feel that we are plunging for the first time into the pure waters of poetry itself, impervious to fad. No dross, no affectation: instead, Oppenheim gives us strangeness, tone, translucency.« Wayne Koestenbaum