Berg, Aase: Dark Matter

Dark Matter by Aase Berg Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson (Black Ocean Books, paperback)

Publication Date: March 5, 2013

Publisher Marketing: 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.

"Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark."—China Miéville

"Aase Berg's poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries.... When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseated and almost seasick from her texts."—Åsa Beckman