Francis Picabia
I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation
translated by Marc Lowenthal
MIT Press, 2007

Francis Picabia’s raucous early poems, which dare the unprecedented and traffic in the sheer possibilities of abstract shimmering gesture. His late aphorisms are startling bolts of congealed thought. Marc Lowenthal has done the history of radical modernist poetry a great service by bringing these works of exquisitely offbeat taste and intoxicating élan into English. His translations of the turbulent work of this “freeloading angel” show uncanny skill and welcome verve.
— Charles Bernstein

the following excerpts, all but the first of Picabia's diagrammatic visual poems, are used with the permission of MIT Press.