I was interviewed for a podcast recently and was asked to speak on books that I would recommend and why and I failingly tried to explain what Ursula Andkjær Olsen had done to me with their books Third Millennium Heart, Outgoing Vessel, and My Jewel Box and in real life I pause often and am unprepared so just wanted to put this/these here as something that I said and meant to keep saying.
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Third Millennium Heart
by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Action Books/Broken Dimanche Press, 2017
But the refining of loneliness has begun, it’s going to be a
castle; it will become your castle that
can later gain two towers, can later lose one,
two walls. – {from} the section DARLING GLORIA
In reading, then re-reading, Third-Millennium Heart, by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, I scratched, beneath other penciled-in marginalia, two things: perhaps I have avoided myself into existence and he takes a holiday as something maternal to do with your time. This book has goals for its body language, and, with a claustrophobic sparseness, seems a first for finality. These are entries written in the surroundings of your outer-sibling, where a red pacifier suns itself in a dream some hole is having about my mouth. Your mouth. I don’t know. There is a nobody and, as a nobody, she will name identity. I think some of these passages, here, were changed by the reader.
As a thing propelled by its inability to continue, Third-Millennium Heart is a terrifying, and lovingly unreliable, work by a writer acutely aware of the obliviousness in self and in other. It carries itself with a chronological intelligence, is joyous, and deepens all things ahistoric with its unsleeping and uprooted verse. As a pair, Ursula Andkjær Olsen and Katrine Øgaard Jensen awaken the moment, are alive to scarcity.
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OUTGOING VESSEL
by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Action Books, 2021
Proof, hosanna, proof. Oh, my discarded bits of avoidance. Is ghost still held as a breath in a being that cannot materialize until it's misplaced by our up and coming carrier? I think it's all there, all here, in the anti-instructional humbleharm and worldless afterlife of Ursula Andkjær Olsen's Outgoing Vessel. So bare and terrifying, so saturated and self-afflicted. I can't say what the verse here is cleaning, nor what the competing repetitions are being fed by, but it moves me to condone guilt and permit that I'm the youngest thing about myself. These are poetics that reject the reimagining of the under-imagined and instead chant themselves through songdoors might they create origins to be upheld by the pregnant deceivers of elevation. I might not have it right. What if renewal came first? Is there a machine built by grief that manufactures alienation? Crossed-over and crossed-out, this is scarily disappeared and necessary stuff.
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My Jewel Box
by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Action Books, 2022
While reading the mouth-bathed insertions as they are mid-written in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s My Jewel Box, I have this dream in a later body where I can be seen watching my veins do nothing in the same lab where it was once proven that god was buried alive. What valid surrogacy is this? As translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, it is a surrogacy of photogenic pain and pain’s plural. Of struck snake and of birth being both have and have-not. Adornment and strangling, says Olsen, says Jensen, and slowly suddenness is everywhere. I can ghost people I've never met. In this verse, in channels of otherharm, dolls dream but only if you notice. Maps are made from the worry that one’s anatomy is disappearing, not as we speak, but as we are silent. Words mean what sounds mean. I sucked on a penny as a child and my salt brain loneliness called it fruit. Are these your cow negatives? Mask loses a tooth. Mask has a cavity. In the reading, I’m not sure that I’ve ever had an allowable blue thought. In the after, I’m hyperaware of time’s inability to be present. Somewhere in between, or in the during, there is a restart of an irreplaceable beginning and it is here the work makes vaccines of permission and recounts, perhaps, touch’s second chance. This is the third book in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s trilogy, with the first being Third-Millennium Heart and the second Outgoing Vessel, each of which were also translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. The body has a body it uses to find bodies. God will get his unneeded rest, I’m sure.
kingsoftrain 