Description
Description
A raw, sweeping debut collection that interrogates the limits of the human animal and confronts the boundary between fear and freedom.
The startling English-language debut of Swedish polymath Anna Nygren is at once a domestic autistic ethnography, a more-than-human erotic pastoral, and an illustrated choreography of bewilderment. Willful misspellings and created constructions open language up to play, with phrases existing somewhere between English and Swedish to de-pathologize speech and thought. This fairy-tale treatise on otherness interweaves Nygren's own inimitable illustrations to visualize the idea that writing can be closer to a drawing of words than speaking. "We know yet nothing," they write. "We whisper it in the night / We are the pride glittering."
Sensory and sensual perception mesh through the liquid movement of the book's three parts as the speaker queers the notion of difference, exploring fraught ideas of gender and identity by tapping into the profane and the physical body. blush, hungry and dysphoric and tied inextricably to family memory, begins rooted in the corporeal before moving outside of it, calculating the speaker's orientation to others and to the world. fox, meeting love with violence, characterizes pain with short, dissonant syntax and finds reprieve in the cover of forest. And between forest and family is translation, river, which simultaneously stitches together and tears apart as it bears witness to the epistemology of becoming.
Wholly unique, a being all its own, blush / river / fox paws on the door of our eye, our heart, our ear: "LET ME IN / the Fox whispers."
About the Author
About the Author
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"In their first English-language publication, Swedish artist and writer Nygren pushes and pulls language forms, creating a tripartite poetry collection that is visceral, playful, urgent, and fragmented."--Becca Brody, Library Journal
"Brutal, honest, out-of-this-world, a form of maximalist-minimalism, I would compare Anna Nygren's writing to Kathy Acker, but no, it goes deeper than Acker, into its own unique territory and genre. Genreless works are almost always the best, the ones that you don't quite know which bookshelf to put them on, uncategorizable, they need their own bookshelf altogether. This is one of the finest examples of one of these works."--Alvina Chamberland, author of Love the World or Get Killed Trying
"In Anna Nygren's extraordinarily profound and beautifully tender American debut, the presence of the Swedish language hovers remarkably just below the English language as if each were a kind of transparency. Nygren's writing is virtuosic and transformative and holds within it an internal depth I have never before known."--Malena Mörling, editor and translator of The Star by My Head
"Reading Anna Nygren's astonishing blush / river / fox, I found myself returning to Bataille's sentence, 'The animal is in the world like water in water.' The integration of these animals into the world of the book is achieved through the discursive gestures of repetition and spelling, through surprise and orthographic wildness. But for these animals, in this world, integration brings hard edges: even the light is hard, pricks us. That there is pain, that waters are not always so confluent, is part of its tempo. In just the way our animal bodies, sticky with pink gloss and blood, die, dissolve and thereby shine ('Everyone else shines so strangely'), this book's study of loneliness refines our togetherness, that magic we make when we accompany one another. blush / river / fox is at once furious, tender, open, and unstoppable. I love it."--Brandon Brown, author of The Four Seasons
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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