Tsunami from Solaris: Essays
Aase Berg

Translated by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney
ISBN 978-0-900575-83-9 | $12.00 | April 1, 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.

PRAISE FOR AASE BERG

“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, author of I Myself A House of Light

“Aase Berg’s poems deepdive 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, author of When the Sick Rule the World

“Oh, you have taken it too far, Aase Berg, on this field trip to dismember an apocalyptic body that is self-bomb, culture-bomb; you are scratching at the interior of the bomb that has no exterior. Amusedly, bombastically, terrifyingly you scratch. Johannes Göransson’s translation is lush and boldly guttural and the two of you have my intestines by a leash.”

— Cathy Wagner, author of Nervous Device

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aase Berg is the author of seven books of poetry, two books of criticism, a YA novel and, most recently, the novel Haggan. In 2011, she was awarded Dagens Nyheter’s Lagercrantzen for her criticism. In 2012 she was awarded Aftonbladet’s literary award for her poetry. Her work has been translated into numerous languages. Five books of her poetry have been translated into English, including With Deer and, most recently, Hackers.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Johannes Göransson is the author of six books of poetry, Transgressive Circulation: Essays On Translation, and the diaries Poetry Against All. He is also the translator of several books of poetry by Aase Berg, Johan Jönson, Kim Yideum, Henry Parland and Ann Jäderlund. With Joyelle McSweeney, he edits Action Books. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eight books of poetry, prose, drama, and criticism: The Red Bird, The Commandrine, and Flet, from Fence; Nylund, the Sarcogropher and Salamandrine, 8 Gothics from Tarpaulin Sky Press; the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, which inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize from Litmus Press; the critical volume The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults from the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series; and Toxicon, a volume of poems forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2020. With Johannes Göransson, she cofounded Action Books and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.