Transfer Fat

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes G ransson. Aase Berg's TRANSFER FAT (Forsla fett), nominated in 2002 for Sweden's prestigious Augustpriset for the best poetry book, is a haunting amalgamation of languages and elements--of science, of pregnancy, of whales, of the naturally and unnaturally grotesque--that births things unforeseen and intimately alien. Johannes G ransson's translation captures the seething instability of Berg's bizarre compound nouns and linguistic contortions.

"The super-electron microscope Berg has used in her research shows the world's smallest particles--the vibrations of strings (belly buttons, violin strings, super strings)--announcing that matter is music and music is language and language is matter. As in the singularity of a black hole, the reader will find that time and space have become one, and that there are words in all directions."--Daniel Sj lin

"Johannes G ransson's translations of Aase Berg are themselves a kind of gorgeous, dripping fat transference, a 'carry ing of the] smelt / across the hard lake, ' an extra, extra 'pouring' of the 'runny body.' G rannsson's radical theories of translation, as satanic addition and glorious mutation, are at their absolute best in TRANSFER FAT. And Berg's 'meat which flows / between the fingers' is fat to bursting with the sick, slick permeations and violent political possibilities of language/bodies gone haywire. Make that hare-wire."--Kate Durbin

"TRANSFER FAT distends time-space, makes it seize, stutter, and repeat itself. These minute (in-)verses offer temporary microarchitectures no bigger than a duct, an eyelash or a black radioactive grain which might collapse or reboot the Universe in the very next frame. But not here, not yet, where 'rabies is freedom / in the Year of the Hare // here in the black fathermilk / of loneliness.'"--Joyelle McSweeney