Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire

One of the most influential, if rarely seen, visual poetry books of the post-war avant-garde, Pomerand's Lettrist masterwork elaborates a psychogeographic story of the bohemian Parisian neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés through punning prose-poems and dazzling, rebus-like "metagraphics" on facing pages.

Pomerand's SAINT GHETTO OF THE LOANS (1950) is one of the earliest, and perhaps most formidably sustained examples of the Lettrist's engagement with verbo-visual expression. This expanded, bilingual edition also includes the book's original preface by the filmmaker Jacques Baratier, the author's idiosyncratic resumé of his published works, a contextualizing afterword by Michael Kasper, as well as a complete bibliography and filmography, which reveals the breadth and scope of Pomerand's Lettrist activities.

"The Second World War destroyed more than cities and people, it destroyed language. Pomerand's solution was to create a whole new language, and then translate it back into French. Here, finally, we have an English translation of that French translation, alongside Pomerand's new language, one that the present disaster suggests we might still need."--McKenzie Wark

"Every twentieth-century art movement has certain works that acquire mythic status by their combination of idiosyncratic oddity and rarity. This fascinating work--playing with meaning and image, vision and reading, familiar reference and invented language--has mainly been known through reproduction of a handful of its pages and this exciting republication will finally bring attention to this amazing piece of graphic experimental writing."--Johanna Drucker

"Fortunately for the uninitiated, Pomerand's often otherwise unyielding esoteric ciphers are interpreted here in both French and English. ... Readers today owe its dauntless translators, Michael Kasper and Bhamati Viswanathan, an unredeemable debt of thanks for this rarest of book's republication."--Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, Rain Taxi

Poetry. Art. Jewish Studies.