Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A stark, uncanny collection of poems translated from one of Sweden's most influential and beloved poets. In Lonespeech, Ann J derlund rewires the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan into a series of sparse, runic poems about the act of communication and its fraught failures. Forsaking her reputation as a baroque poet, J derlund uses simple words and phrases in favor of an almost childlike simplicity, giving her poems, on first glance, the appearance of parables: mountains, sunlight, rivers, aortas. On closer inspection, the poems glitch, bend, and torque this simplicity into something enigmatic and forceful, lending them, as J derlund says, the force of "clear velocity."