Book talk

On November 3, join us for a talk on the Faroe Islands’ National Book Award-winning poetry collection "What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium" with Kim Simonsen and Randi Ward. The distinguished author will delve into his new poetics to Faroese literature, now out in translation from Deep Vellum Publishing, with the translator and ASF Translation Prize Winner Randi Ward.

The rhetorical title of this collection posits the crisis that is underway. Simonsen asks: as a species among species, all composed of the matter of the universe, how has our compulsion to classify everything hierarchically estranged us from ourselves, each other, and Earth’s ecosystems? Simonsen challenges our anthropocentric pursuit of knowledge, exploring humankind’s relationship with itself as an element of the natural world. What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium follows the struggles of its narrator as he reckons with intensifying estrangement from his fellow organisms, gradually turning to the greater kinship of matter to find continuity, connection, and solace.

“The vulnerability of being alive at such a pivotal period in Earth’s history underpins this highly original, compact collection from Kim Simonsen, superbly translated by Randi Ward.”

—Michael Favala Goldman, translator of Tove Ditlevsen’s The Trouble with Happiness