Tsunami from Solaris

Author: Aase Berg

Translators: Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney

Publisher: Action Books (2019)

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.

“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 nauseous and almost seasick from her texts.”

–Åsa Beckman

“Aase Berg’s poems deep-dive through the perversity of nature, groping the outer edges of subjectivity. Along this super-charged border dichotomies infest one another—inside/outside, human/animal, animate/inanimate, macro/micro—and desire cannibalizes all. Think Hansel and Gretel on acid, think of the horrors of cookie dough. If this unflinching and awesome collection is the shape of modern poetry, then, as Bob Hope said in his 1965 United Artists modernist classic, ‘I’ll take Sweden.’”

–Dodie Bellamy