Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! On June 10, we’ll be discussing A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, a collection by contemporary Icelandic poet Brynja Hjálmsdóttir that has been hailed as “peculiar and unforgettable,” “strange and compelling,” and “deeply weird,” and whose translation by Rachel Britton was the recipient of ASF’s 2023 Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize.
In A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, one woman lives in a glass ball that is being shaken by someone else. This book of poems, however, is always shaking itself up, leaping between the extreme and the daily, the gross and the delicious, between being scared and being scary. These surreal, visceral, and somehow polite poems explore what it can be like to be a woman and to slither through and away from threat to find voice and form and power, no matter how strange. The apocalyptic utopia we arrive at in this book—The Whore’s City—is a perfect model to move to in one’s head: feminist, funny, odd, and a little disgusting, all towards transformation.
A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder is available in paperback from Circumference Books, from Asterism Books, and from Amazon.
“A sly, refreshing, and vivid book” (Emily Hunt)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brynja Hjálmsdóttir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland. She is the author of two books of poetry and a novel. Her first book, Okfruman, was awarded Poetry Book of the Year by the Icelandic Booksellers’ Choice Awards and was nominated for the Icelandic Women’s Literary Award. Kona lítur við (A Woman Looks over Her Shoulder) was nominated for the Maístjarnan Poetry Award. In 2022, Hjálmsdóttir received the Jóns úr Vör poetry prize and the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Encouragement Award. Her work has been translated into six languages.