Lonespeech

One of Sweden’s most unique living poets.

Jäderlund’s poem indicates the impossibility of a collective or representative body to which we might address ourselves and anchor our identifications. Yet it also holds forth the possibility of inventing new vocabularies, new ways of speaking and receiving that are founded on that very impossibility, on that absence, where everyone is strange, foreign, beginning. Can we find the words?

There is something compelling and fresh about the collective sweep and leaps of Jäderlund’s peculiar concisions in the hands of translator Johannes Göransson.

Ann Jäderlund’s Lonespeech lets sound do the clawing and makes of surface a thing once heard. As translated by Johannes Göransson, it is a work of remaining transmutation. . . This is an endeavor of transformative non-ness. So, escape and swallow and return.

Lonespeech is a dialogue edited down to a poem. . . Jäderlund offers a deconstructed and pieced-back-together version of a dialogue in which words, rather than people, stand together, relate, and attempt to communicate on the page.

These deceptively minimalist poems fold time and space creating verbal structures that have vast interiors.

Despite the darkening gaze in Lonespeech, I never read Jäderlund as someone who only writes from the terms of death. Her books always carry with them a part of life, minutes, silences, speeds, love and light. It is not enough to describe Jäderlund’s poems as craft—they are magical.

[A] constellation of elemental and bodily imagery. . . haunting.

A work that feels like the meta-biography of a relationship, a meditation on how we can know our world, others, or ourselves. . . a powerful love letter to the art of poetry.