Hjálmsdóttir, Brynja / Britton, Rachel (tr.): A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder

Circumference Books, paperback

Translated by: Rachel Britton

Publication Date: November 15, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 

In A WOMAN LOOKS OVER HER SHOULDER, written by contemporary Icelandic poet Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and translated by Rachel Britton, one woman lives in a glass ball that is being shaken by someone else. This book of poems, however, is always shaking itself up, leaping between the extreme and the daily, the gross and the delicious, between being scared and being scary. These surreal, visceral, and somehow polite poems explore what it can be like to be a woman and to slither through and away from threat to find voice and form and power, no matter how strange. The apocalyptic utopia we arrive at in this book—The Whore’s City—is a perfect model to move to in one’s head: feminist, funny, odd, and a little disgusting, all towards transformation.

"A WOMAN LOOKS OVER HER SHOULDER is a strange and compelling book which relentlessly pokes at and pokes fun at the I/thou dynamic of Women and Men in our culture. Repetitions of official speech acts both deaden them and hold them up to the light; the poems remind me of Vasco Popa’s in their simplicity and archetypal, restricted vocabulary. It's harder than it looks to make simple language like this feel totally genuine and idiomatic, but Rachel Britton's translations help these great poems attain their amazing sense of universality."--Matthew Rohrer