Third-Millennium Heart
(By Ursula Andkjær Olsen)
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| Author | Ursula Andkjær Olsen |
2018 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD FINALIST (US)
“From a distance established through sparse text and guttural truth, Olsen, through Jensen’s imaginative feats of translation, confronts us with an unsparing, lucid world view.”
—Harvard Review
"Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s compelling work travels through dark chambers of desire, power, and creation, conjuring up a feminist space where culture and nature wage war with one another, where psychology and anatomy merge to create a uniquely modern mytho-poetics. Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s masterful translation has a strong rhythm all its own, and captures the book’s jarring quality in a remarkably smooth rendering. By the end of this insidious text, the reader is just as “namedrunk” as the book’s enigmatic lyrical subject, and discovers that their own “heartspace,” too, has been torn open, dissected, and beautifully recreated."
—Judges' Citation, 2018 National Translation Award
With black humor and cutting logic, Third-Millennium Heart explores the confounding nature of power and desire, the problem of asserting a feminist alternative without recapitulating patriarchal power structures: “The goal is to weaken every trace of odor. It will cost me my victory scent.” Yet Olsen’s ambivalence entails an embryonic potential: uncoupled from all normative arrivals, her syntax sprouts with mutant possibility, one nimbly conveyed by translator Jensen’s flexible touch. From the darkness of this “comajubilation,” in a stutter-step of declarations and retractions, Third-Millennium Heart is a work of radical re-conjuration: “Together we will beat/in the great DELTA.”
PRAISE FOR THIRD-MILLENNIUM HEART
“Like a supercollider smashing together exotic subatomic particles just to see what happens, Olsen accelerates language to the very limits, detonating it to watch what knowledge comes forth from ecstasy.”
—The Believer
“Olsen reminds us through her language that what we think of as natural may, in fact, be the technical; the science of ourselves is renewed in these poems.”
—Words Without Borders
“This intoxicating and terrifying poem (or many poems) is a meditation humming with repeated mantras of feminist poetics, words inside of words inside of pages inside of the book held inside your hands.”
—Kenyon Review
“Olsen’s writing has a way of dislodging one’s sense of self-possession; we look up from her book at a world that seems stranger, more beautiful and far more alarming—than before we started reading it.“
—The Quarterly Conversation
"I would love for everyone to read this book—I am advocating for its circulation. At the same time, the book doesn’t need us to read it in order for it to be alive. We need to be alive to it."
—Best Translated Book Award judge Aditi Machado”
