Surrealist Love Poems

. University of Chicago Press, $22.5 (120pp) ISBN 978-0-226-09871-5

Erotic, impassioned and necrophilic, the 60 works gathered in Surrealist Love Poems celebrate the idea of obsessive and transformative love. ""I want to sleep with you side by side.... Consumed by ecstatic mad inertia/ Stretched out on your shadow/ Hammered by your tongue/ To die in a rabbit's rotting teeth/ Happy,"" writes Joyce Mansour. City University of New York comparative literature professor Mary Ann Caws places poems by major surrealist writers like Andr Breton and Paul Eluard, along with the poetry of Picasso, Dal! and Frida Kahlo, side by side with 14 lushly printed and alluring b&w photos by the likes of Man Ray, Lee Miller and Claude Cahun. ( Feb. 14)

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