Lonespeech

“One of Sweden’s most unique living poets.”

—Nordic Council Literature Prize 

"Jäderlund’s poems resist digestible consumption as much as they elicit a terrific awe. . . stunningly brilliant." 

—Cary Stough, Cleveland Review of Books

"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?"

—Matthew Rana, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The translator’s relationship to the text is a cognate of that between sender and receiver. Göransson is equally receptive to Jäderlund’s gnomic intensity and to her elusive tendencies. His disinterest in the false axioms of untranslatability of poetry makes for a much better book than one looking for linguistic equivalences." —Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet Books

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

—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub

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

—Tracy Zeman, antiphony

"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." 

—Sara Abdullahi Lekta, translated by Johannes Göransson, Sublunary Editions

"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." 

—Iloe Ariss and Venya Gushchin, Full Stop

"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." —Barton Smock

"In Ann Jäderlund’s paradoxical poems, it is the crystal clear loneliness that makes an encounter possible. From the cells and the body, the words break out into the wider world where another person is formed. The language is fragile, precise and resolutely subtle, as surprising as it is mind-expanding."

—Aase Berg

"Ann Jäderlund’s words are simple and her syntax distraught. The off-kilter prepositions Johannes Göransson deploys in his translation—“I can see the word / it goes through the eye”; “The sun goes in the aorta”; “I have / been / stabbed to / the brains”—radically reorient my experience of bare phenomena. It is not that my senses receive; it is that they are poisoned and transformed. This is an elemental, autoerotic lyric whose peculiar way of clinging to the world utterly mystifies and rejuvenates me. “Little flower / you burst”—and you burst."

—Aditi Machado

"The syntax of Ann Jäderlund, line by torquing line, cobbles together multifangled bodies and landscapes that poison and stun—coursing toward perception along verbal tightropes whose assonance carries disturbance in the precarious shelter of near-lullabies. Johannes Göransson’s dexterously imaginative handling of a poetics that has set off debates about incomprehensibility in its “catastrophizing of cliche” renders the untranslatable apprehensible, bringing us into contact with this poetry’s raw awe: a foreclang, a river that runs lard, tears straightened up, and a speech that keeps us captive in the loneliness and communion expressed through these meticulously replaited specimens of correspondence between Bachmann and Celan."

—Jennifer Scappettone

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

—David Leftwich

 “Jäderlund twists old texts, stacks up baroque images and incomprehensible statements, naively concretises abstract entities, and combines different semantic fields: 'tins powder the heaven pink.' She creates neologisms and uses a syntax that sometimes borders on the ungrammatical.” 

—Lisette Keustermans, Poetry International

 “This is poetry as the terrorizing thrill of exposure in play! Until this book forced me into thinking it, it had not occurred to me that one of the central themes of my experience of the world is to have my alone-ness interrupted, a force at once exhilarating and violently dominating, rupturing my play/stage/diorama. . .” 

—Olivia Cronk, Critical Flame