“Katrine Øgaard Jensen and her collaborators engage in transritual and transcreation as acts of writing—transwriting. Their varied triggers and processes are spectacular. Ancient Algorithms reveals immense possibilities of language and poetry to become fearless and unbordered.”
— Don Mee Choi, author of Mirror Nation

I’m very pleased to announce I’m one of the poet collaborators in Katrine’s remarkable new book from Sarabande Books! Ancient Algorithms is a series of mistranslations and remixes of her award-winning translations of Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s poetry trilogy (published by Action Books). Through deliberate obstructions and self-imposed rules, Katrine and I re-interpreted and rewrote her mistranslations of Olsen’s My Jewel Box.

I feel incredibly grateful to Katrine for having invited me to be a part of this extraordinary experimental translation project with so many translators and friends whom I greatly admire: CA Conrad, Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, Baba Badji, and Ursula Andkjær Olsen herself!

Here is a brief excerpt:

now we enter
my new growth stage
the stage is a stage
[I join the cast as Katrine]
I am no Katrine-doll
I am no doll, I am Katrine
a row of relation
familiar exterior relations
i.e. Paul has taken all the relations
and the situations of place
and entered the person concerned
only to repeat the entire scene
new interiority

This book is like Lars Von Trier’s The Five Obstructions — but for translators of poetry!

My fourth full-length book of poetry — Brillo — is also now available to preorder from Lavender Ink Press. “Brillo-shaped / block / fragment / of life / locked behind / a window / artifact of devotion” What does it mean to “see the old face in the altered one”? Taking my cues from Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘seeing-in,’ Brillo is more than a poet’s meditation on Paul Thek’s 1965 “Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box,” it’s a perception-expanding experiment that challenges readers to become spectators—to visualize poet as painter. Just as Thek signed his letters to his friend Susan Sontag as “Vincent” (after Van Gogh), I navigate the psychology of advertising, leaving a different kind of signature on a box of—a book of—questions concerning the art market, the meatpacking industry, mechanical reproduction, visual modernity, and Catholicism. Brillo might not be the answer to the (sin)ewy riddle oozing inside Thek’s pop art reliquary, but, like the knife-sharp clouds of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, this box/book might force you to look in directions you’ve never dared to before. As Andy Warhol once said: “Art is what you can get away with.”

Learn more about Brillo [here]. Watch the official book trailer below: