Ursula Andkjær Olsen
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Action Books Fall 2017: Recent and Imminent
You can’t cut a cross-section of the Action Books catalog without getting covered in the radical, political, visionary, gorgeous, grotesque poetical blood that runs through our veins; you can’t map the international span of the Action Books roster without turning the globe in every direction. We are extremely proud of these impossibilities. This playlist is culled from some of our recently released books from here and afar, from the translated collections we’ve published in the past by groundbreaking Korean poets Kim Hyesoon and Kim Yideum, and from two of our upcoming releases, THIRD MILLENNIUM HEART by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen (Denmark) and ADRENALIN by Ghayath Almadoun (Syria).
View playlistThe Second Person
These are just a few poems that make clever, heartrending, enigmatic, and startling uses of the second person. I am fascinated by you--the second person pronoun--because of its capaciousness and changeability. There is the you that refers just to you, the singular you; but then there's the plural you, the group of you, the masses of all of you; there's the you you that is all of us or all of them at once; there's the you that is actually a part of me. I love second person address because it seems to lay bare the communicative thrust behind all acts of poetry. To invoke you in my poem calls attention to the fact that--whether you are out there and listening or not, whether you are specific or general, living or dead, human or nonhuman--you exist, I remember you, and I am trying to reach you.
View playlistOutgoing Vessel
Olsen’s narration shifts from technical incisiveness to slangy humor, orbiting centers of intense hurt
—K. B. Thors, Harvard Review
Through the course of OUTGOING VESSEL we witness the speaker’s emergence as a voice of concern, intent on invalidating loneliness—through her outgoing/incoming vessel she comes to a radicalizing understanding of empathy and experience.
—Joseph Schreiber
Bios:
Ursula Andkjær Olsen (b. 1970) made her literary debut in 2000 and has since published nine collections of poetry and one novel, in addition to several dramatic texts and libretti for operas such as Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Sol går op, sol går ned, and composer Peter Bruun’s Miki Alone, which was awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2008. Olsen has received numerous awards for her work, including the Danish Arts Foundation’s Award of Distinction in 2017, the 2012 Montanaprisen award for Det 3. årtusindes hjerte (Third-Millennium Heart, Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books 2017), and the 2015 Danish Critics Prize for Literature for Udgående fartøj (Outgoing Vessel, Action Books 2021). Since 2019, Olsen has served as head of The Danish Academy of Creative Writing. Her latest poetry collection, Mit Smykkeskrin (My Jewel Box, Action Books 2022), was published by Gyldendal in
January 2020.
Katrine Øgaard Jensen (b. 1988) is a writer and translator from the Danish. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the 2018 National Translation Award in Poetry for her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s book-length poem, Third-Millennium Heart (Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books 2017). She teaches creative writing and literary translation at Columbia University, where she served as Acting Director of LTAC (Literary Translation at Columbia) from 2019-2020. Her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel is out now from Action Books.