Join us on January 14 for a virtual book talk will be joined by
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.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Katarina Frostenson is one of the most notable living Nordic poets. The author of over twenty books, her work has had a major influence on Swedish poetry since the 1980s. She has in addition written dramas, prose, and an opera libretto, and translated works by Duras, Bataille, Bove, and Michaux. Frostenson has received nearly every literary prize in Sweden and many across European. Her writing has been translated into over a dozen languages ranging from French, German, Italian, and Spanish to Belarusian, Croatian, Polish, and Serbian. In 2003, she was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in recognition of her services to literature and in 2016 was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize—Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary honor—for the present collection, which has also been translated into French and Italian. In 2019-2021, she released the autofictional trilogy K, F, and A, the first of which also premiered as a stage play in October 2022 at the Folkteatern in Gothenburg. Her latest book, Alma, appeared in 2023.
Ann Jäderlund (b. 1955) is a poet as well as a translator and playwright. She is widely acknowledged as one of the leading Swedish poets over the past forty plus years. Her enigmatic second book, Which once had been meadow, set off a fierce debate in Swedish media—now known as “the Ann Jäderlund Debates”—about the role of mystery, accessibility and gender in contemporary poetry. She has gone on to write eleven books of poetry, as well as children’s books and plays. For her work, she has received numerous awards and honors, including the Aniara Prize, the Bellman Prize, The Nine’s Big Prize and the Erik Lindegren Prize. In 2022, her collected poems were published by Bonniers.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Johannes Göransson (b. 1973) is the author of eight books of poetry, including Summer and the collaborative (with Sara Tuss Efrik) and The New Quarantine, a decreative translation of Göransson’s first book of poetry. He has translated several poets, including Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Helena Boberg and Eva Kristina Olsson. Göransson was born in Lund, Sweden but has for many years lived in the US. He’s the co-founder of Action Books and teaches at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN.
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Recent book-length translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M. (2024), The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón (2024), In Vitro by Isabel Zapata (2023), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (2023), and Copy by Dolores Dorantes (2022). A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry and among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest. As a poet, Robin is the author of the forthcoming Centro (Coffee House Press, 2026).
Bradley Harmon is a writer, translator and scholar of Nordic and German literature, film, and philosophy. A Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University, he has been an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellow to Sweden, a Fulbright fellow to Germany, and an Emerging Translator Mentee with the American Literary Translator’s Association. He also is co-editor of the volume Rilke and the Horizons of Phenomenology (De Gruyter, 2025) and a special dossier on translation and literary citizenship in the American academy (MLN 138.5, 2023). The Space of Time is his debut book of literary translation.