Post­mod­ernist writ­ers often grav­i­tate toward the frag­men­tary, the alin­ear, the mul­ti­lin­guis­tic and mul­ti­va­lent. Mireille Gansel cer­tain­ly fits this descrip­tion. Her book, Soul House, is a col­lec­tion of prose poems that fol­low a French – Eng­lish bilin­gual format.

How should the read­er sit­u­ate them­selves with­in this kind of writ­ing? The poems plunge us into stream-of-con­scious, bare­ly punc­tu­at­ed, and infre­quent­ly cap­i­tal­ized sentences:

this light of late sum­mer on the lake and the moun­tains you agree to come see this paint­ing just this paint­ing and you will tell me I need your child­ish look then we walked down­hill along Col­lège Calvin and in your danc­ing steps you climbed the majes­tic steps of the museum … 

Halfway through this post­mod­ern pil­grim­age, Gansel sug­gests that the promised ​“soul house” may not be a house at all. In ​“ren­dre un mot habitable/​to make a word hab­it­able,” she recounts a vis­it to a muse­um in an Aus­tri­an vil­lage: ​“Heimatsmu­se­um: how to trans­late this word? And then Heimat? The native coun­try and the house, home, the home.” 

The read­er learns that this neigh­bor­hood in Aus­tria has become a sanc­tu­ary for many refugees, for whom the muse­um offers cre­ative space; sev­er­al of them want to form a small orches­tra togeth­er. The piece cul­mi­nates with a breath­tak­ing vision of a ​“Heimat-coun­try … where one has the right to enter to speak to one anoth­er to speak with­out words to meet those from here and else­where to share a meal with the scents and fla­vors of so far away links of friend­ship are forged … ” 

The con­cept of Heimat was deeply ingrained in Nazi ide­ol­o­gy. But Gansel widens our under­stand­ing of this word. One reads her book as an imag­i­nary neigh­bor, a cohab­i­tant of a won­drous, mul­ti­lin­gual, mul­ti­cul­tur­al, metahis­tor­i­cal land, to which the poet offers mul­ti­ple gate­ways rather than a map.