Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson. In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Aase Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche--pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror. WITH DEER [Hos radjur] was Berg's first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published four more books in her native language, exploring the divine terror throbbing beneath the surface of a naturalistic and barely human world. "Oh, you have taken it too far, Aase Berg, on this field trip to dismember an apocalyptic body that is self-bomb, culture-bomb; you are scratching at the interior of the bomb that has no exterior. Amusedly, bombastically, terrifyingly you scratch. Johannes Gorannson's translation is lush and boldly guttural and the two of you have my intestines by a leash. `One by one you turned my faces up/toward the sun's surface/and drank them like deer water'"--Cathy Wagner.
Review
"Oh, you have taken it too far, Aase Berg, on this field trip to dismember an apocalyptic body that is self-bomb, culture-bomb; you are scratching at the interior of the bomb that has no exterior. Amusedly, bombastically, terrifyingly you scratch. Johannes Gorannson's translation is lush and boldly guttural and the two of you have my intestines by a leash. 'One by one you turned my faces up/toward the sun's surface/and drank them like deer water.'" Cathy Wagner
Review
"These poems have the scent of a lost hermetic text extracted from the oily black clay of a ruined forest. Long suppressed scenes of deliberate, feral ritual and the thrill of animal submission are herein joyfully revealed." Michael Gira
Review
"Aase Berg's poems deepdive through the perversity of nature, groping the outer edges of subjectivity....Think Hansel and Gretel on acid, think of the horrors of cookie dough. If this unflinching and awesome collection is the shape of modern poetry, then, as Bob Hope said in his 1965 United Artists modernist classic, 'I'll take Sweden.'" Dodie Bellamy
Review
"Like Bjork, or Werner Herzog, Berg is infatuated with the intense perversity of the world, will and representation, and like them, Berg knows to make her case as beautiful and wild as possible. Berg is especially good at giving her bizarre fantasies a polish more often associated with ordinary sadistic blandness.
There lay the guinea pigs and ached and were made of dough. There lay the guinea pigs beside the knives that would slice them up like loaves. And my sister with lips of blueberries, soil and mush. In the distance, the siren bleated inhumanly. That is where the guinea pigs lay and waited with blood around their mouths and contorted bodies. They waited. And I was tired in my whole stomach from meat dough and guinea pig loaf and I knew that they would take revenge on me.
I'm taken in here by the lullaby repetitions, the drowsy (wounded) repose that if I've seen before it was through a peephole in a museum in Philadelphia, Duchamp's Etant Donnes. This restrained presentation of provocative material feels completely convincing to me, as does the strange plasticity of the guinea pigs, and the mounting creeping creepy feeling." Jordan Davis, The Constant Critic (Read the entire )
Synopsis
In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Aase Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche — pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror.
With Deer [Hos radjur] was Berg's first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published four more books in her native language, exploring the divine terror throbbing beneath the surface of a naturalistic and barely human world.
Description
Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson.
About the Author
Swedish poet Aase Berg began her artistic trajectory as a member of the radical organization, the Surrealist Group of Stockholm. Her first book,
Hos radjur (With Deer), was published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published
Mork materia (Dark Matter),
Forsla fett (Transfer Fat),
Uppland (Uppland) and
Loss (Loss). Her first book to appear in English,
Remainland: Selected Poems, was published by Action Books in 2004. She is considered one of the most influential and unique poets in Sweden, earning her translations into English and various European languages as well.
Johannes Goransson was born in Sweden, but has lived around the US for several years. He is the author of: Dear Ra (Starcherone, 2008), Pilot (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008) and A New Quarantine Will Take My Place (Apostrophe Books, 2007) — and the chapbook Majakovskij en tragedy (Dos Press, 2008). He is also the translator of: Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonsson, Gingerbread Monuments by Victor Johansson and Klara Kallstrom, Remainland: Selected Poems by Aase Berg and Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland. He is the co-editor of Action Books and the online journal Action, Yes.