A linguistically playful and dark book of poems from one of Sweden’s most influential and unique poets.

One might expect a book by Aase Berg with the title Aase’s Death to be dark, and it is. You may also expect it to be parodic, and maybe it is that too. But if it’s parodic, it’s darkly parodic. A defiantly dark laughter animates the book.

It’s also—like most of her writing—a slangy, linguistically playful book. Berg has argued that at the heart of language is “a kind of happy babbling for the sake of babbling.” But in Aase’s Death, the babbling is not happy or paradisical; it’s drudgy and slow as if underwater. This feeling is apparent in the way the words move in the poems. The grammar is sometimes random and purposely fails to comply with the rules of good writing. If the deepsea state of mind is a kind of depression—even “death”—we can also see in this failure to comply with rules, a kind of bodily, mimetic rebellion, a kind of insurrectionary depression. This is the state of Aase’s Death: a poetics of failing to use the right words, failing to be good, failing to be alive.

Swedish poet Aase Berg began her artistic trajectory as a member of the radical organization, the Surrealist Group of Stockholm. Her books include With Deer (2009), Dark Matter (2013), and Hackers (2017)—all translated by Johannes Göransson into English and published by Black Ocean.

Johannes Göransson is the author of nine books of poetry in English, including Summer, and the translator of several books by Swedish poets. He is the co-editor of Action Books and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.