Marie Silkeberg has been a major voice in Swedish poetry since the early 1990s. In these poems, translated by Kelsi Vanada and drawn from her two most recent collections, Atlantis and Till Damaskus (written with Ghayath Almadhoun, whose poems from the collection were published in English translation as Adrenalin), she tackles some of the most wrenching events of recent decades—globalization, the escalating war in Syria, and its ongoing aftermath and consequences. The speakers of these poems live in a reality informed by these events and by an older European history. Taking the standpoint of listener and observer forced to confront the horrors in present tense, the poems question how we share the pain of others, and how the meeting between different experiences of trauma influences language. The poems are matched with stills from Silkeberg’s poetry films, putting word and image in dialogue to explore ruins, cityscapes, the echoes of history, all into the depth of language’s power.

Flexibound
$25.95
ISBN: 9781949597110
168 pp. 6.5 in x 8.25 in 24 color illus.

Marie Silkeberg is a poet, translator, and poetry filmmaker living in Stockholm. She has published eight collections of poetry, including 23:23 (2006), Material (2010), and Till Damaskus (2014). Atlantis (2017) is her most recent book. She spent ten years as Professor in Creative Writing at Valand Academy at Gothenburg University and three years as HCA Academy Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. She has translated several books by the Danish poet Inger Christensen, as well as American poets such as Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Patti Smith, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Claudia Rankine. Together with different composers, filmmakers, and poets, she has made text and sound compositions and poetry films, the four most recent together with Ghayath Almadhoun. In 2015 she was a visiting writer at the International Writing Program in Iowa City, Iowa. She held a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2017, and a MacDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire in 2018.

www.mariesilkeberg.com

“In Silkeberg’s poems, the lost earth seems able to rebirth itself.”

— Stina Otterberg, Dagens Nyheter

“Beautiful, breathtakingly threatening, cruel as only love can be.... It’s hard not to just sit still and let the wonder overtake you.”

—Kristian Lundberg, Aftonbladet

“...illuminates the tactile world, with its particular ambivalence between loss and lost paradise, and wide-open utopian possibility.”

—Göran Sommardal, Sveriges Radio