words toward Helena Boberg’s ‘Sense Violence’, as translated by Johannes Görannson (Black Ocean, 2020)

Sense Violence
Helena Boberg
translated by Johannes Görannson
Black Ocean, 2020

Helena Boberg’s Sense Violence, as translated in the before and after by Johannes Görannson, is a wounded spreading that knows to embed itself in the healing amnesia of sobered yearnings. Its anti-retreat is a two-sided debt that scratches the inner wrist of otherharm while scooping secondhand into the deep lottery of the sensual. There are pinecones in the mirror’s abandoned nest, and handwritings that die on the wall you imagine and that live inside the wall you can’t. Proximity starves distance. If reclaiming is a weakness we overproduce, then this is a return of rich scarcity. A return of the already to the thereness of a permanence mistaken for golden residence. Touch is a verse. Touch a tender anarchy. Touch a seeing that is looking for the looking that male witness has observed to the point of boring the vision. ‘Or the child / inexhaustible / drills into / the world.’ ‘Topple / through a window / let yourself hatch.’ Yes and no, memory. Be the last of our late hurt.

~

reflection by Barton Smock