Join us on January 14 for a virtual book talk on Katarina Frostenson’s The Space of Time (Songs and Formulae), (Threadsuns Press, October 2024) and Ann Jäderlund’s Lonespeech (Nightboat Books, May 2024). Frostenson’s translator Brad Harmon and Jäderlund’s translator Johannes Göransson will be joined by moderator Robin Myers for readings and discussions. 

Winner of the 2016 Nordic Council Literature Prize, The Space of Time is an unsentimental and smoldering study of the ecological and utopic function of grief. Frostenson seems to speak to the universal orphan lost in the Open, in the landscape, in literature, in bedwarmth, and in lamentation. 

In Lonespeech, Ann Jäderlund rewires the correspondence between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan into a series of stark, runic poems about the fraught act of communication and its failures. Forsaking her reputation as a baroque poet, Jäderlund 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. Upon closer inspection, the poems glitch, bend, and torque into something else, enigmatic and forceful, lending them, as Jäderlund says, the force of “clear velocity.”

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