First published 2022
Carolyn Forché and Lars Gustaf Andersson bring Swedish poet Lasse Söderberg into English for the first time in a substantial collection. Söderberg has spent seventy years capturing life's dreamlike qualities in verse shaped by surrealists like Paz and Eluard. His poems shift between cultures and political moments with fluid ease. "The air is like gold leaf," he observes, "I take a deep breath/and become gilded inside." The author of more than thirty poetry books, Söderberg adopts different personas as he moves from one reality to another. Ilya Kaminsky calls this collection "one of the most important and moving collections of poetry in translation that I have read this decade." The translations reveal why Söderberg's phantasmagorical approach to existence has sustained his voice across seven decades of writing.
Genres: 20th-century, poetry, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: persona, shifting-realities
Paperback