City Lights’ poetry editor revisits the lion of Surrealism, André Breton

In the last six months, City Lights poetry editor Garrett Caples has ushered new editions of two surrealist tomes to market, an act rife with literary significance. In February, a reissue of Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia, 1943-1966: Pocket Poets No. 20, originally published in 1967. And on August 26, the first English translation of André Breton’s final book in Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays, 1952-1966, translated by Austin Carder from the French version originally published in 1970—and to be fêted at City Lights in a Thu/11 launch party.

As early as 2004, Caples has explored the inextricable connections between the two surrealist luminaries: Breton, a founder and theoretician of the original surrealist movement, and Lamantia, a delighted devotee who decamped to New York City at th