Dark Matter
Berg’s hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated—drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, Dark Matter aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: “a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system’s last chance to communicate with the dying I.” The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations.
Swedish poet Aase Berg began her artistic trajectory as a member of the radical organization, the Surrealist Group of Stockholm. Her first book, Hos rådjur (With Deer), was published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published several other books). She is considered one of the most influential and unique poets in Sweden, earning her translations into English and various European languages as well.
Johannes Göransson was born in Sweden, but has lived around the US for several years. He is the author and translator of several books, and is the co-editor of Action Books.
