Aase Berg's Newest, Hackers, Reviewed by Alexis Alemeida

As part of a special feature called "Facing the Anthropocene," Swedish poet Aase Berg’s Hackers (Black Ocean, 2017), translated by Johanness Göransson, is reviewed at the Council for European Studies' EuropeNow Journal. "Hackers enacts its title in a way, inhabiting the reader and directing them, with a certain degree of swagger, toward its many inquiries," writes Alexis Almeida. More:

One of the things I found to be most interesting and most challenging about Hackers was its dialogue with the natural world. Aase Berg, one of the members of the radical Stockholm Surrealist Group founded in the mid-80s, has always had an interest in French surrealism and more recently in contemporary natural science, and her poems have also held a dialogue with traditional Swedish poets (Martinson, Tranströmer), as well as avant-garde poets (Ann Jäderlund, for example). Because the Swedish avant-garde does not share the same attributes as the North American one (there is an emphasis on anachronistic, flowery imagery, for example), the influences embedded in the presence of natural imagery in the poems may not be apparent to some readers, but they are certainly there, and not without their own critiques/re-writings of those influences. While there can be a deceptive cleanness, bareness to the poems:

Rabbits stand
on two feet
Rabbits always land
on their feet

The rabbit grail is raised,
Let’s get wasted!

Let’s get wasted
and refuse
our feet

there is also an insistent shift in perspective, even tone – here, the natural world cannot be contemplated passively, used as means for the speaking subject to reflect back on itself. Instead, the relationship between humans/animals, humans/environment is always being called into question, fused together, also viewed through different areas of cultural production.

Read the full review at EuropeNow Journal.