On Aase Berg's Tricky Tsunami from Solaris: Essays on Poetry

Translated by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney, Swedish poet and critic Aase Berg's new collection, Tsunami from Solaris: Essays on Poetry (Action Books, 2019), "leans toward a trickster poetics." The "poem is formless, a protoplasm, a jellyfish, an amoeba that glides around and ignores the human race's grave chronologies," quotes Samuel Binns in a new review for the Arkansas International. More:

...[E]ach essay swells with an introspective metamorphosis. The collection features an expansive scope of enlightening ruminations, including musings of wounds and scars; pregnancy and motherhood (“that cute, paradisiacal madness”); subversion of the patriarchy and capitalism; playfulness; joy and suffering; adulthood; the awe-inspiring madness of children; and the nature of language and a poem’s landscape, all which offer readers new lenses and modes of thinking—to employ for the creation of poetry—to experience the world as a human being. 

Berg advocates for wonder and protests patriarchal seriousness. Provocative questions undulate throughout the collection: “is language a game?”; “should one in certain moments avoid writing about or depicting angst about mortality?”; and “why is the poem such an insult to the cruelty of life itself?”

Read it all here. And, yes, of course we have an offering from the collection here.