Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Edited and translated by Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes G�ransson. For over a decade, Aase Berg's poetry has permeated audiences from China to Romania to the US with its mix of linguistic permutations, feminist re-embodiments, and sci-fi atmospherics. Originally published in venues from daily newspapers to literary journals, the essays and columns collected here provide a characteristically refreshing set of coordinates, establishing the surreal, grotesque, and offbeat as unexpected arsenals for aesthetic and political insurgency.

Tsunami from Solaris: Essays on Poetry (Salvo, 4)

Literature & Fiction

Berg, Aase

Essays & Correspondence

Action Books

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goranson. REMAINLAND showcases poetry from four volumes by Aase Berg, one ofSweden's most celebrated and subversive young writers. From the wrecked fairy-tale-scape of With Deer to the pregnancy allegory Transfer Fat, from the sci-fi naturalism of Dark Matter to the catastrophic oasis of Uppland, Berg works language into miniature grotesques which invert the truisms of contemporary society. Her compulsive inventiveness provides an excoriating challenge to all cultures of complacency. "Let yourself be troubled by this terrific poetry--this is a place of weird music and visceral delight"--Lisa Jarnot.

Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg

Poetry

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson. 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 rådjur] 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 Görannson'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

With Deer

History & Criticism

Black Ocean

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson. Berg's hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated—drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, DARK MATTER aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: "a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system's last chance to communicate with the dying I." The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations. "Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark."—China Miéville "Aase Berg's poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries.... When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseated and almost seasick from her texts."—Åsa Beckman

Dark Matter

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson. Aase Berg's TRANSFER FAT (Forsla fett), nominated in 2002 for Sweden's prestigious Augustpriset for the best poetry book, is a haunting amalgamation of languages and elements—of science, of pregnancy, of whales, of the naturally and unnaturally grotesque—that births things unforeseen and intimately alien. Johannes Göransson's translation captures the seething instability of Berg's bizarre compound nouns and linguistic contortions. "The super-electron microscope Berg has used in her research shows the world's smallest particles—the vibrations of strings (belly buttons, violin strings, super strings)—announcing that matter is music and music is language and language is matter. As in the singularity of a black hole, the reader will find that time and space have become one, and that there are words in all directions."—Daniel Sjölin "Johannes Göransson's translations of Aase Berg are themselves a kind of gorgeous, dripping fat transference, a 'carry[ing of the] smelt / across the hard lake,' an extra, extra 'pouring' of the 'runny body.' Görannsson's radical theories of translation, as satanic addition and glorious mutation, are at their absolute best in TRANSFER FAT. And Berg's 'meat which flows / between the fingers' is fat to bursting with the sick, slick permeations and violent political possibilities of language/bodies gone haywire. Make that hare-wire."—Kate Durbin "TRANSFER FAT distends time-space, makes it seize, stutter, and repeat itself. These minute (in-)verses offer temporary microarchitectures no bigger than a duct, an eyelash or a black radioactive grain which might collapse or reboot the Universe in the very next frame. But not here, not yet, where 'rabies is freedom / in the Year of the Hare // here in the black fathermilk / of loneliness.'"—Joyelle McSweeney

Transfer Fat

Ugly Duckling Presse

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson. "This is a threat." That's how HACKERS, Swedish writer Aase Berg's seventh book of poetry, begins. HACKERS is a furious, feminist book about wanting to "hack" the patriarchal system—both in the physically violent sense and in the sense of computer hacking. But Berg also reveals the 'hag' behind the 'hack,' channeling the non-compliant rage of Glenn-Close-as-bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction. The world Berg "hags" back at is a world of sexist, capitalist, environmental, globalized violence. The fury of the hacker/hag/captive/revenger is constantly boiling up on the edges of Berg's compounds and highways, threatening to infiltrate the center. In these spectacular battle scenes and hacked pastorals, where nature is besieged by the highways of progress and the animals don't give a damn about the humans, the hag rises.

Hackers

Drawn from International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2013, Ouroboros is a chapbook of poetry by Aase Berg presented in Swedish, English, and Chinese. Ouroboros is also available, along with the chapbooks of other internationally renowned poets, in Islands or Continents (Eighteen-volume Set). Selected poems from this volume are featured in the anthology Islands or Continents: International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2013.

Ouroboros (Islands or Continents)

The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press

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