New Swedish Poetry | Katarina Frostenson & Ann Jäderlund

See a book talk on New Swedish Poetry with Katarina Frostenson & Ann Jäderlund! In this virtual event held from Scandinavia House Online on January 14, 2025, the Nordic poets discuss their recent collections —
Katarina Frostenson’s "The Space of Time (Songs and Formulae)," (Threadsuns Press, October 2024) and Ann Jäderlund’s "Lonespeech" (Nightboat Books, May 2024) — with Frostenson’s translator Brad Harmon and Jäderlund’s translator Johannes Göransson. Poet and translator Robin Myers moderates.

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.”

Learn more about programs at Scandinavia House at
https://www.scandinaviahouse.org/

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