Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice is a series of prose poems about the estranged self living outside of one’s native land and away from one’s native tongue. Romanian poet Alta Ifland writes first in French, then translates her work into English, before returning to the original French for further revisions, a process of linguistic reconciliation as much as translation.

Published in a bilingual, French–English edition, Ifland repeatedly turns to remembered images of her unnamed homeland to animate her unfamiliar home, creating, what poet Gary Young calls “a brilliant collection of prose poems document[ing] the quest for a coherent self, an authentic identity born out of the chaos of language and history.” He continues, “Ifland’s poems trace a radical process of de-creation—dismemberment of the body, dissolution of the ego, abandonment of the self—and the reinvention of a new identity, purified by the acid of tears. This new creation—tentative and rarified, ‘a child’s body of light’—earns a tenuous existence, but it proves to be enough to withstand the omnipresent threat of oblivion.”

Voix de Glace/Voice of Ice won the 2008 Prix Louis Guillaume du Poème en Prose/Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poetry.

This title is a second revised and expanded edition, released as part of punctum’s Special Collections project.

About the First Edition

• Review of Alta Ifland, Voice of Ice, This Just In…News From The Agony Column.
• Voice of Ice by Alta Ifland – Review & Giveaway, carp(e) libris reviews.
• Desislava D. Taylor, “Decomposed Reality,” Reclaim Tabula Rasa.

About the Author

Born and raised in Communist Romania, Alta Ifland came to the US as a political refugee in 1991, where she obtained a PhD in French language and literature. Ifland’s other works include a book of prose poems, The Snail’s Song (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011), which includes her original drawings, and two books of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World (Ninebark Press, 2010) and Death-in-a-Box (Subito Press, 2010). Ifland’s novels, The Wife Who Wasn’t and Speaking to No. 4 were published by New Europe Books in 2021 and 2022. Her latest published work, an atypical historical novel (written entirely as a dialogue), Two Queens and a Chronicler, is forthcoming in October 2025 from Open Ends Press. Ifland’s writings have been translated into French, Romanian and Russian. After 30 years of living in the US—Florida, Arizona, and California—Ifland now lives in France.

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