Michelle Noteboom: Poet, Translator, and Author of Edging

Michelle Noteboom is an American poet and translator based in Paris whose books include Edging, The Chia Letters, Roadkill, and Landskips. Her work moves between American and French literary cultures through poetry, translation, and the long-running bilingual reading series Ivy Writers.

Noteboom belongs among contemporary poets whose careers are shaped by more than one language and literary community. Her poems often combine dreamlike images, bodily perception, ordinary objects, instability, and a strong sense of movement through space.

Edging

Noteboom’s first book, Edging, won the Heartland Poetry Prize. The collection established a poetic voice attentive to boundaries: between waking and dream, body and landscape, interior thought and physical surroundings.

Her poems from this period appeared in journals including Boston Review, Fence, Verse, Sentence, and The Columbia Poetry Review. Their compressed imagery and associative movement place her work within a broad field of experimental poetry.

The Chia Letters

The Chia Letters, published by Dusie Kollektiv, continued Noteboom’s interest in sequence, address, and the shifting relation between speaker and world. The book belongs to the small-press and transnational poetry culture in which her work has circulated for decades.

Roadkill

Roadkill, published by Corrupt Press in 2013, brings landscape, movement, collision, memory, and mortality into a compact poetic field. Its title suggests the harsh encounter between travel and interruption, a tension that recurs in Noteboom’s attention to bodies, roads, objects, and the instability of perception.

Landskips

Landskips, published by Estepa Editions, extends Noteboom’s exploration of place and visual perception. The altered spelling in the title signals an interest in landscape as something made through language rather than simply observed.

Across these books, place behaves as an active poetic force. Paris, memory, travel, objects, and the physical world enter poems that repeatedly test how language can alter what appears familiar.

Translation from French

Noteboom also translates contemporary French poetry into English. Her translations include Frédéric Forte’s Minute Operas and Virginie Poitrasson’s The Unlikeness of Things, published by Litmus Press in 2025.

Translation is central to her literary life because it places close reading and writing inside the same act. Rhythm, syntax, tone, image, and cultural context all have to survive movement between languages while remaining alive as poems in English.

Ivy Writers in Paris

Noteboom moved to Paris in 1991 after completing a BA in English literature at the University of Michigan and continued her studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. In 2005 she co-founded the Ivy Writers reading series with poet Jennifer K. Dick.

Ivy Writers became a bilingual Paris reading series bringing together writers from France, the United States, and other literary communities. The project reflects the same transatlantic exchange that shapes Noteboom’s own work as poet and translator.