I am a beautiful monster

Poet, painter, self-described funny guy, idiot, failure, pickpocket, and anti-artist par excellence, Francis Picabia was a defining figure in the Dada movement; indeed, Andre Breton called Picabia one of the only “true” Dadas. Yet very little of Picabia’s poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. `I Am a Beautiful Monster’ is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia’s writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia’s poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator. Picabia’s poetry and prose is belligerent, abstract, polemical, radical, and sometimes simply baffling. His early poetry, with its uncompromising disregard for literary convention and readerly expectation, seems to anticipate Dada; His Dada manifestos are alternately engaging and insufferable. Picabia’s later poems are more troublesome critically, given their wholesale borrowing and manipulation of Nietzsche.