Join us for a virtual book talk with Norwegian poet Kristin Berget on when the light comes it will be so fantastic, with translator and poet Kathleen Maris Paltrineri. They’ll discuss the 2017 Brage Prize-nominated poetry collection, now out in translation from Northwestern University Press, with moderator Marisa Siegel (Fixed Stars, 2022).

and when the light comes it will be so fantastic weaves together themes of ecological and linguistic loss, memory and deep time, and motherhood and grief. Berget’s poetics point to landscapes used as sites of extraction, where exhausted phosphorus, starving clay layers, and forest machines are encountered. The poems in this collection traverse forests, deserts, and seas—their poetic matter separated by fields of caesuras, visual absences suggestive of Earth’s ongoing extinctions. As jurors of the Brage Prize commented, within these pages is a universe where humans can seldom be separated from one another or from the nature they live in and among. Berget’s first book translated into English is an innovative exploration of the climate crises we are living with today and the complex emotions that ebb and flow along with it.

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