My Jewel Box

My Jewel Box, by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, translated from Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, is a testament to interconnectivity on ever-shifting scales. Olsen reimagines human history across successive generations as a set of nesting dolls, or “a priceless castle that was once inside another castle / equally priceless,” or “Chinese boxes” stacked one inside another to infinity. The book’s seven sections are punctuated by artist Sophia Kalkau’s photographs of sculptures, often ovular, and the book’s cover features Uterus, a large metal capsule seemingly suited for deep sea exploration.

Throughout this collection, Olsen considers bodies during “the transition from fertile to not-fertile / from full moon to new moon,” which adds depth to her frequent invocation of opposing ideas: 

a zooming into the cell
where every element can become its own opposite

all is soiled and brightly clean
a deep, deep radiance

The effect is one not of clashing but rather of a pattern of contradictions illuminating a complicated, ever-expanding universe. Thus, images from one poem, “mother of pearl / mother of nothing / mother of pearl // mother of nothing” reverberate and are further developed in another: 

a sea shell lined with
mother of nothing
a sea shell lined with
mother of everything

While Jenson notes the challenge of maintaining the “jarring quality” of fragmentary lines, which start and stop mid-thought, her translation is wonderful to read aloud:

the body is my crown: my open back
glistens with gold

the open spaces in the system
make the assigned spaces flow

the clouds glide by in the blue sky
as if played too fast

These poems meditate not only on motherhood but also on the quality of a vessel and the physical power of bringing forth life from a void, at once futuristic and prehistoric. Olsen’s poems invite us to observe the universe breathing, to listen to “the heartbeats of a windshield wiper in the rain” and understand how “three windmills in a row” are “inhuman sylphs that dance / inhumanly slow.” What these poems make us see, finally, is how humans are as hewn and crafted as the objects around us, “a garden executed entirely in embroidery,” and also “a forest with window glass between the branches / a magnificent, self-sown realm of pavilions.”