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Dark Matter
Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson, Berg's hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated--drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, DARK MATTER aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: "a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system's last chance to communicate with the dying I." The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations. "Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark." --China Mieville; "Aase Berg's poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries....When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseated and almost seasick from her texts." --Asa Beckman
188 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Aase Berg
38 books75 followersPoet, fiction writer, critic, translator, and one of the founding members of the Stockholm Surrealist Group.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
March 5, 2013
This review appears at: http://shreddedmaps.tumblr.com
Aase Berg’s DARK MATTER (trans. Johannes Gorannson) has left me garbled and pale, grasping stripped skin. I entered this book. The first entrance was a stumble and an engrossment of wonder. Berg’s word-shards snap, form space: frozen, tremor, horror, stillness. The second entrance was from last poem to first. I shuddered no less, felt a vague inability to articulate solid meaning in any cohesive way other than by the weak phrase, “splendid void.” My mouth drips. Splendid, though, is the mastery of Gorannson’s translation whose own work gratifies and haunts. We are in fine hands. The third entrance (night/kitchen/blue light/hall): poems out of order as if this reach would somehow wrap my tongue around the fullness hole. I read poems like, “Cryptogram,” “Aniara,” “Rubber Cathedral,” “Glass Deer.” I remain pale with little air. These, my first encounters with Berg’s voidscapes, have wounded me beautiful. I am a pile of flesh. I have slipped, willfully, towards dark matter.
DARK MATTER refuses access to the main chamber. Tentacles. Deer. Leatherface in the dark. The shreds, snuff images of these spaces, this body in transition, this hybrid longing leaves me bewildered and smiling to Alexander, to Zachris, to the nameless others.
She speaks poems like “In Darkful Lande:”
Lights burn in a darkful lande.
Here the dogs of Dovre, their cold wails.
Hear the shriek of the tall fires,
hear the wings of pain drag
across the land.
The tone presented here, this ominous world in ruin, has begun to seep, does not end in silence. I cannot shut the book. Float. Dissect. Trace love to the most inward parts of the empty shell. Through these poems it is the body and the places of the body and how the body collapses under longing that I felt so intimately in passages like, “I now lick my tongue against the outer claws of the fingers to tear life into the ions, to make sores bitter in the tongue’s blue ventricles.” The tongue of the reader must speak (tongue) this line to the desolate horror-zones, where Berg gnaws, splatters traces from the inside. She writes, “The darkness of matter is soundless.” My mind refuses to hold.
In the section, “Cathedral Formations:”
When a tool or a machine part has burst,
the fracture surface is usually investigated to determine
if it is fine-grained or coarse-grained.
Broken, I have no way to wrap myself around Berg’s shell, but to sink in wonder. I wonder how, to the poet or the character of these poems, this may be wisdom or a warning or a love-trail of abandonment. And if these lines deceive you, too, know that to enter DARK MATTER is to drift in a zone where terrors bubble up, fester. It is not an easy space to enter. Prepare. Judging by the inadequacy of the words written here today, it is a much harder thing to articulate in terms of a “review.” Perhaps these pieces are “The temptingsondepth’s hearing” of its own howls. This is how space would sound if you were enclosed in a shell, a shell to float into the black of space. There we could be silent knowledge. It could be there, in a poem, where we finally disappear.
Aase Berg’s DARK MATTER (trans. Johannes Gorannson) has left me garbled and pale, grasping stripped skin. I entered this book. The first entrance was a stumble and an engrossment of wonder. Berg’s word-shards snap, form space: frozen, tremor, horror, stillness. The second entrance was from last poem to first. I shuddered no less, felt a vague inability to articulate solid meaning in any cohesive way other than by the weak phrase, “splendid void.” My mouth drips. Splendid, though, is the mastery of Gorannson’s translation whose own work gratifies and haunts. We are in fine hands. The third entrance (night/kitchen/blue light/hall): poems out of order as if this reach would somehow wrap my tongue around the fullness hole. I read poems like, “Cryptogram,” “Aniara,” “Rubber Cathedral,” “Glass Deer.” I remain pale with little air. These, my first encounters with Berg’s voidscapes, have wounded me beautiful. I am a pile of flesh. I have slipped, willfully, towards dark matter.
DARK MATTER refuses access to the main chamber. Tentacles. Deer. Leatherface in the dark. The shreds, snuff images of these spaces, this body in transition, this hybrid longing leaves me bewildered and smiling to Alexander, to Zachris, to the nameless others.
She speaks poems like “In Darkful Lande:”
Lights burn in a darkful lande.
Here the dogs of Dovre, their cold wails.
Hear the shriek of the tall fires,
hear the wings of pain drag
across the land.
The tone presented here, this ominous world in ruin, has begun to seep, does not end in silence. I cannot shut the book. Float. Dissect. Trace love to the most inward parts of the empty shell. Through these poems it is the body and the places of the body and how the body collapses under longing that I felt so intimately in passages like, “I now lick my tongue against the outer claws of the fingers to tear life into the ions, to make sores bitter in the tongue’s blue ventricles.” The tongue of the reader must speak (tongue) this line to the desolate horror-zones, where Berg gnaws, splatters traces from the inside. She writes, “The darkness of matter is soundless.” My mind refuses to hold.
In the section, “Cathedral Formations:”
When a tool or a machine part has burst,
the fracture surface is usually investigated to determine
if it is fine-grained or coarse-grained.
Broken, I have no way to wrap myself around Berg’s shell, but to sink in wonder. I wonder how, to the poet or the character of these poems, this may be wisdom or a warning or a love-trail of abandonment. And if these lines deceive you, too, know that to enter DARK MATTER is to drift in a zone where terrors bubble up, fester. It is not an easy space to enter. Prepare. Judging by the inadequacy of the words written here today, it is a much harder thing to articulate in terms of a “review.” Perhaps these pieces are “The temptingsondepth’s hearing” of its own howls. This is how space would sound if you were enclosed in a shell, a shell to float into the black of space. There we could be silent knowledge. It could be there, in a poem, where we finally disappear.
January 15, 2019
This fantastic text is a matter of hallucinatory portions divided into parts, images that decodes time and space, but at the same time you’re lost on the lonely star rotating the earth.
I’m a proud owner of a copy of this book and will be diving into more of her work. Some of my favorite parts listed...
In Dovre Slate Mill
The Lemur Hypothesis
The Animal Gap
Red Giant
Mare Imbrium
Eons
The Hydrogen Song
I’m a proud owner of a copy of this book and will be diving into more of her work. Some of my favorite parts listed...
In Dovre Slate Mill
The Lemur Hypothesis
The Animal Gap
Red Giant
Mare Imbrium
Eons
The Hydrogen Song
Read
April 24, 2022Dunkelt dov diktdystopi. Mitt läseex var försett med sidoanteckningar i blyerts som nämner Foucault, Butler och Freud. Scifi-igt, kroppsligt och svävande. Kan förstå att det är en favoritbok för Jeff VanderMeer.
March 18, 2018
“It was the autumn when the weather came wrong in the atmosphere. How to predict that the pattern will overwhelm reality? How to know that one is watching particles until they change form?
Everything has to go somewhere in the logic of the great redistribution. Everything must be reevaluated even though the dimensions are breaking. When matter leaves chasms in the hollow after its removal. There is nowhere at all to die in the mirror halls of concretion. But I will meet the gaze never lose hold of the gaze.
I will reach into the strata’s anxiety to read matter’s brain. I will reach into the gaze’s anxiety to shelter the nervous things.”
Everything has to go somewhere in the logic of the great redistribution. Everything must be reevaluated even though the dimensions are breaking. When matter leaves chasms in the hollow after its removal. There is nowhere at all to die in the mirror halls of concretion. But I will meet the gaze never lose hold of the gaze.
I will reach into the strata’s anxiety to read matter’s brain. I will reach into the gaze’s anxiety to shelter the nervous things.”
April 15, 2013
Like a grotesque SF dream: distorted silhouettes, mutilated bodies, suspended cathedrals, dark water. One of the best books of poetry I've read in a long time.
"And I will wait for you inside the black shell, Zachris."
"And I will wait for you inside the black shell, Zachris."
February 19, 2020
(upon finishing this book I sent an email reminder to myself only stating "ILL the other Aase Berg books" and that was it; I only note this as it's fairly rare for me to encounter an authorial voice that I immediately want to pursue/consume in totality)
(oh, funny enough, I've maxed my ILL requests at the moment, so it'll need to wait a bit, lol)
Surrealistically hypnotic prose-poetry with a sci-fi / post-human / grotesquerie inflected influence and a propulsive rhythm. I read it once and then read it again (admittedly it being like 80 pages helped on the immediate re-read); really not for most readers through (hell, that’s the case for most prose poetry and surrealism), so here are two brief passages to either turn you off or entice you, depending on your appetites:
AND
(oh, funny enough, I've maxed my ILL requests at the moment, so it'll need to wait a bit, lol)
Surrealistically hypnotic prose-poetry with a sci-fi / post-human / grotesquerie inflected influence and a propulsive rhythm. I read it once and then read it again (admittedly it being like 80 pages helped on the immediate re-read); really not for most readers through (hell, that’s the case for most prose poetry and surrealism), so here are two brief passages to either turn you off or entice you, depending on your appetites:
Maneuver the body across deep traps, across water-clogged holes and open wells, across the animal’s wet fur with terror in my neck's frenzy. Sharp branches strike and lash bloodneedles against my finger-skin, my face of blue enamel against naked nettle fibers. On the other side of the smelting plant at the edge of the gloomy lake there I see Zachris move too close to the shaft. I move closer to the head despite the chains clanging dull metal against the febrile radula. Here runs a visible underground border, a fistulation toward Mare Imbrium. I thrust the muscle latch toward the machines that throb there in the wound. What evil may befall you, what evil may befall you here near heavy waters. In the smithy the Daude choir’s tortured bolts shrieking against sharp spits. Chitin staffs, porphyry, cold coal crystals. And my stiff hands cupped, and my stiff hands cupped around the surface of your black cranium
AND
FALL HOLES
There are no shadows between the things, there are holes.There are no things next to each other stacked in clean rows. Every space between a pitfall, in toward the stage where the things are at once a glitterchaos of sparkling particles. I have no shadow around the body, I have cracks that will swallow me.
l go into the song when it sings.
I go into the hearing when it hears.
l go into the hole and am a non-hole when the mechanisms are crumpled together, the things’ relationship in a ragnarök of sighs, implosion out of the world around me.
A cold wind is blowing as the reverse side topples.
lt goes into me is sucked into me,
l carry my nothing on the mass of Everything.
December 23, 2024
Aase Berg’s Dark Matter is as though William Burroughs taught Lovecraft how to write poetry. I’m definitely not upset about it. I feel Berg’s debut With Deer is a stronger collection, with its thick rotting earthiness. Dark Matter is otherworldly, synthetic. Still a very strong primarily prose-poetry collection of madness, stardust, and chaotic biology. Surrealism, horror, and science seeped into poetry.
April 17, 2018
Edit: 14th of April, small changes to make it... better? Yes, better.
Original Review 8th of April
Disclaimer: Wrote this immediately after finishing. No editing.
Small edit: 1 cl is 10 cubiccentimeters not 1... -.-
Okay. This was my first modern (I think) poetry Collection. It was not a good book to start with. I really didn't like it. Why I didn't DNF? Because I really wanted to write why. Hate read it .
Now, poetry is very personal, for some it is a release and a joy, others torture. I fall in the first category (usually). I like poetry, but I have mostly read Classic (?) poetry, not modern except for a line or two here and there. Was this be a good start? H*** no.
To start with, I didn't fell like there were any direction with the poems, they didn't feel connected even in there own "chapter". Yes, that main theme was, but it was so broken up and not in an artistic way for me. It didn't feel like it was done intentionally, more like they mixed some notes up when sending it off to be finalized. I will give it that the structure in each chapter was cohesive, but thats it. There were parts I liked, my favorite quote is:
That's the only one I bothered to remember the pagenumber for (page 133 if anyone is intrested). It was easier to remember these quotes:
Do you know what problems I have with these? The first one, I'm a dental hygienist, please tell me how enamel on a tongue can give pain? Teeth yes, but a tongue? It's more the whole sentence to be honest... And don't say "artistic, bla, bla, bla". I Think that was when I gave up on this Collection. The second one can get a small pass since centiliters definition is 10 cubic centimeters, but still!
Okay... Next thing.
You /the main character/whatever goes throu a series of transformations that evolve. Intersting concept. IF, you know, you actually continued that format and got more and more evolved, and didn't go back and forth. As in turned human in the middle. That might have been my pet peeve, so there is that.
Did I get the symbolism? Yes. I got the oil, the climate chage, the wars, the mining of Resources, bla bla bla. This was not for me.
Recommend?
Never. Read something else by her? Maybe. If I pick up Another book and don't realise that it's by the same author.
(Read the Swedish pages, so you can't say that the translator made mistakes, I read her version. Actually went to the translation sometimes to get what she meant.)
Original Review 8th of April
Disclaimer: Wrote this immediately after finishing. No editing.
Small edit: 1 cl is 10 cubiccentimeters not 1... -.-
Okay. This was my first modern (I think) poetry Collection. It was not a good book to start with. I really didn't like it. Why I didn't DNF? Because I really wanted to write why. Hate read it .
Now, poetry is very personal, for some it is a release and a joy, others torture. I fall in the first category (usually). I like poetry, but I have mostly read Classic (?) poetry, not modern except for a line or two here and there. Was this be a good start? H*** no.
To start with, I didn't fell like there were any direction with the poems, they didn't feel connected even in there own "chapter". Yes, that main theme was, but it was so broken up and not in an artistic way for me. It didn't feel like it was done intentionally, more like they mixed some notes up when sending it off to be finalized. I will give it that the structure in each chapter was cohesive, but thats it. There were parts I liked, my favorite quote is:
"An extreme precision is needed
to uncover an orbit in chaos."
That's the only one I bothered to remember the pagenumber for (page 133 if anyone is intrested). It was easier to remember these quotes:
"It (a tongue) moves toward my eyeball, the last twitches of the enamel are true pain" (page 49)
"A centiliter broken crack is the world's reality" (page 103)
Do you know what problems I have with these? The first one, I'm a dental hygienist, please tell me how enamel on a tongue can give pain? Teeth yes, but a tongue? It's more the whole sentence to be honest... And don't say "artistic, bla, bla, bla". I Think that was when I gave up on this Collection. The second one can get a small pass since centiliters definition is 10 cubic centimeters, but still!
Okay... Next thing.
You /the main character/whatever goes throu a series of transformations that evolve. Intersting concept. IF, you know, you actually continued that format and got more and more evolved, and didn't go back and forth. As in turned human in the middle. That might have been my pet peeve, so there is that.
Did I get the symbolism? Yes. I got the oil, the climate chage, the wars, the mining of Resources, bla bla bla. This was not for me.
Recommend?
Never. Read something else by her? Maybe. If I pick up Another book and don't realise that it's by the same author.
(Read the Swedish pages, so you can't say that the translator made mistakes, I read her version. Actually went to the translation sometimes to get what she meant.)
February 23, 2013
I love Aase Berg. I do. Her rhythms, fixations, and unnatural phrasings really get me. So I had been beyond thrilled since I heard Dark Matter was coming out.
I just finished it. All of it. And while there's nothing wrong with it or bad about it, I have to say that nothing about it made me feel. At all. Much less feel in a surprising way. And nothing about it made me think, much less think differently.
I had to give such a bad review to a wonderful poet, but perhaps this just isn't the book for me.
I just finished it. All of it. And while there's nothing wrong with it or bad about it, I have to say that nothing about it made me feel. At all. Much less feel in a surprising way. And nothing about it made me think, much less think differently.
I had to give such a bad review to a wonderful poet, but perhaps this just isn't the book for me.
February 25, 2018
There and here borders cut between different ways of being a life form. I, with my silhouette: without becoming a tree I dare to rest here beneath the tree. This endless faith in rims, edges, cutting points and the loyalty of objects. With an endless trust in the silhouettes, in thst the straps and cuts, the stitches will hold things in place.
Out of a trust in matter.
Swedish surrealist and Lovecraft translator Aase Berg writes prose poetry as a kind of science fiction, conjuring apocalyptic landscapes and biological uncertainties in service of some feverish and occluded vision of the world. A lot of the imagery, striking line by line, are rather hard for me to hold onto with my incomplete understanding of her project (and generally hit-or-miss ability to connect with poetry) but occasional bits shine through.
In the above passage I believe she's commenting on the somewhat illusory perception of the world as a set of discreet things, objects and entities existing in clearly defined terms apart from eachother. In fact these discriminations may be more conceptual and linguistic than actual -- the subatomic reality is much less clear about it. When we dare to rest against the tree, there is an active exchange of matter, a concept that also turns up in The Third Policeman. There, it's a jab at the absurdity of reality once we start to look beneath the simple surfaces. Berg's goals are something more elusive and beautiful. To be returned to in order to glean further.
July 31, 2018
Goransson's translations of Aase Berg are particularly evocative and atmospheric, including physics with alienness of H.P. Lovecraft, into something that seems positively expressionistic and yet apocalyptic. The phrasings are often odd and stilted, but Black Ocean's edition includes the original Swedish that makes some comparisons possible. Berg's ability to incorporate bleeding edges of science and math into a convincing poetics is almost unique and shines particularly clearly here. An excellent work. should be read as a whole.
March 26, 2022
“The adrenaline blooms. The planets drift in a stressed twitches across the sky. One joint is bent the wrong way and bursts.”
A strange and unnerving epic poem written by Aase Berg and translated from Swiss to English by Johannes Göranbson. Jumping from metallic to organic, xyloid to oceanic…a dark, dizzying and disturbingly bleak picture of the future past. God, I wish I wrote this hahahaha.
A strange and unnerving epic poem written by Aase Berg and translated from Swiss to English by Johannes Göranbson. Jumping from metallic to organic, xyloid to oceanic…a dark, dizzying and disturbingly bleak picture of the future past. God, I wish I wrote this hahahaha.
December 22, 2021
To be read in flashes struck from Rimbaud's Illuminations, going up in flames, one page at a time.
July 1, 2022
Den klart starkaste boken av Berg jag läst hittills. Riktigt spännande och intressant, hade gärna grottat ner mig i denna ordentligt. Lagom svårförståelig. Känns kreativ och egen.
April 6, 2013
Having loved With Deer and Transfer Fat, I knew I'd dig this new one from Black Ocean, but I didn't expect for it to tell such a darkly pretty narrative in such a shattered way, so that was an added bonus. Goransson and Berg are the perfect match. Can't wait for the next from this poet / translator-poet team.
October 9, 2025
"Matter is pure evil;
deformity pure-will"
Title and cover promise a universe and that's exactly what it delivers. The exact kind of beautiful nightmarescape I've been wanting to immerse myself in lately, an abstract synthetic-organic bio-horror trip that is delightfully indebted to weird fiction and grotesquely and lovingly mangles and distorts its tropes and signage to the point of pure hallucination, at times making the reader feel as if one is looking directly upon the mind-altering vistas and figures that lay beyond the veil of waking/dreaming that is suggested in much works of "weird" literature. But this is not a pastiche or "avant-gardening" (OC phrase donut steel) of anything, not of pulp, nor of other poetry or litfic. It's its own beast entirely, channeling body horror not for xenophobia (in the instance of Lovecraft whose mythos has a clear influence here), but in terms much more astute to the nature of cosmic horror on philosophical terms - of being placeless in the endlessness of the universe, and how that can manifest in the oftentimes-nightmare of the physical body which has no idea where and why it is among All This. There is a narrative here, though it's cryptic and hard to grasp after only one read, but to me poetry is a medium of suggestion much like music and what I really got out of this was how much this suggests the horror of turbulence among the unstoppable change of the body and the self, and how thru the changing nature of the body we are reminded of our inextricable link to universal processes we can hardly understand even as we embody them. When the nature of your body and your subjectivity is distorted beyond recognition [through disability, trauma, death, or just realizing how small you really are in the endlessness], the nature of chaos is brought to the fore much more boldly than you had ever experienced before it. Berg's dreamland, to me, explores how it feels to realize your form is as impermanent as anything else among the rest of the endless cosmic rubble and you are not delineated in any real way from the nature of infinite decay and rebirth. This isn't a work that's specifically about chronic illness, at least not to my knowledge, but this work that is so thematically and texturally about transformation naturally lends itself to such an interpretation; as a purely emotional landscape, this accurately captures what it feels like to have your inner world distorted when the mind and body can no longer separate themselves from one another, and the unnameable trauma of seeing the world you knew reversed, suddenly unrecognizable forever. But even beyond that, there's just a lot in general to explore here, from its surprisingly melancholic (but very cryptic - and almost even romantic?) narrative, to its analysis of this body horror specifically also when it has been Digitized in a modern world of waste, or the techno-baroque beauty of the language itself, in which Berg crafts extraordinarily suggestive and abstract visual landscapes. And of course you can't forget its twisted, trauma-haunted sense of setting, where human is animal and flesh is earth and earth is machine, and where Berg's distortion of consciousness and depiction of eerily familiar alien worlds makes us acutely aware that our planet and our lifeforms are just as alien as any other planet's in the vacuum of space. This is its own pulsar, dense with both substance and raw viscera, and well worth thumbing through continually. Any fans of the weird and avant-garde in literature would do well to acquaint themselves with this, especially those who love art which suggests as much as it shows - another win in this book's favor, considering how well that slots into the themes and overall literary texture. A great little end-of-year discovery for me, especially for this season.
deformity pure-will"
Title and cover promise a universe and that's exactly what it delivers. The exact kind of beautiful nightmarescape I've been wanting to immerse myself in lately, an abstract synthetic-organic bio-horror trip that is delightfully indebted to weird fiction and grotesquely and lovingly mangles and distorts its tropes and signage to the point of pure hallucination, at times making the reader feel as if one is looking directly upon the mind-altering vistas and figures that lay beyond the veil of waking/dreaming that is suggested in much works of "weird" literature. But this is not a pastiche or "avant-gardening" (OC phrase donut steel) of anything, not of pulp, nor of other poetry or litfic. It's its own beast entirely, channeling body horror not for xenophobia (in the instance of Lovecraft whose mythos has a clear influence here), but in terms much more astute to the nature of cosmic horror on philosophical terms - of being placeless in the endlessness of the universe, and how that can manifest in the oftentimes-nightmare of the physical body which has no idea where and why it is among All This. There is a narrative here, though it's cryptic and hard to grasp after only one read, but to me poetry is a medium of suggestion much like music and what I really got out of this was how much this suggests the horror of turbulence among the unstoppable change of the body and the self, and how thru the changing nature of the body we are reminded of our inextricable link to universal processes we can hardly understand even as we embody them. When the nature of your body and your subjectivity is distorted beyond recognition [through disability, trauma, death, or just realizing how small you really are in the endlessness], the nature of chaos is brought to the fore much more boldly than you had ever experienced before it. Berg's dreamland, to me, explores how it feels to realize your form is as impermanent as anything else among the rest of the endless cosmic rubble and you are not delineated in any real way from the nature of infinite decay and rebirth. This isn't a work that's specifically about chronic illness, at least not to my knowledge, but this work that is so thematically and texturally about transformation naturally lends itself to such an interpretation; as a purely emotional landscape, this accurately captures what it feels like to have your inner world distorted when the mind and body can no longer separate themselves from one another, and the unnameable trauma of seeing the world you knew reversed, suddenly unrecognizable forever. But even beyond that, there's just a lot in general to explore here, from its surprisingly melancholic (but very cryptic - and almost even romantic?) narrative, to its analysis of this body horror specifically also when it has been Digitized in a modern world of waste, or the techno-baroque beauty of the language itself, in which Berg crafts extraordinarily suggestive and abstract visual landscapes. And of course you can't forget its twisted, trauma-haunted sense of setting, where human is animal and flesh is earth and earth is machine, and where Berg's distortion of consciousness and depiction of eerily familiar alien worlds makes us acutely aware that our planet and our lifeforms are just as alien as any other planet's in the vacuum of space. This is its own pulsar, dense with both substance and raw viscera, and well worth thumbing through continually. Any fans of the weird and avant-garde in literature would do well to acquaint themselves with this, especially those who love art which suggests as much as it shows - another win in this book's favor, considering how well that slots into the themes and overall literary texture. A great little end-of-year discovery for me, especially for this season.
April 22, 2021
I’ve been fighting bouts of insomnia for months and only recently have gone back to reading paper books. My attention span is getting better. I’m reunited with paper cuts on my knuckles and warped covers. And indirectly reunited with friends. This was a gift for my 35th birthday- the last time I would have so many friends gathered under one roof. Part COVID/part necessary self-exile: the result is living in a void despite sun rises and sets.
I left this midway later that birthday year because school had started. I thought I could balance four graduate courses and a Spanish class on the other side of Manhattan. It didn’t work- I dropped one class, sacrificed Spanish, and I only paid attention to my remaining courses between the Winter void hours of 1am to 7am. Hours I hadn’t pulled since I was in art school, going from one winter darkroom to another.
So now, in another void, I’m finally finished. I went through it with the same uneasiness of listening to a Coil record in the dark (which I suggest and will leave recommendations once I’m done), particularly in her writing on man and nature. In the section, _Bordercuts_, Berg touches on the fragile nature of existence. But in this existence everything is connected, fragility is inevitable, and it doesn’t end at first crack- you follow that break all the way down. In _Psylobe_ “sharp rain is falling out of the ribcage skies,” onto something or someone so tied to the earth it knows its lungs. It’s not a rebirth, it’s not a death, it’s a painful change of form.
I brought Coil into the fray when I got to _Breaths of Air_, where most pieces went back to nature, and the creatures that inhabit them. This review is kind of a cop-out as I don’t want to reprint anything long-form- this book needs to be held. However, please know that Black Deer and Glass Deer, respectively; red foxes and hares exist in pitch-black woods, with the sound of their breaking bones are the only things you hear.
Right, so go read this.
And after you read this, listen to these:
Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
Black Antlers
The Ape of Naples
(specifically Fire of the Mind)
I left this midway later that birthday year because school had started. I thought I could balance four graduate courses and a Spanish class on the other side of Manhattan. It didn’t work- I dropped one class, sacrificed Spanish, and I only paid attention to my remaining courses between the Winter void hours of 1am to 7am. Hours I hadn’t pulled since I was in art school, going from one winter darkroom to another.
So now, in another void, I’m finally finished. I went through it with the same uneasiness of listening to a Coil record in the dark (which I suggest and will leave recommendations once I’m done), particularly in her writing on man and nature. In the section, _Bordercuts_, Berg touches on the fragile nature of existence. But in this existence everything is connected, fragility is inevitable, and it doesn’t end at first crack- you follow that break all the way down. In _Psylobe_ “sharp rain is falling out of the ribcage skies,” onto something or someone so tied to the earth it knows its lungs. It’s not a rebirth, it’s not a death, it’s a painful change of form.
I brought Coil into the fray when I got to _Breaths of Air_, where most pieces went back to nature, and the creatures that inhabit them. This review is kind of a cop-out as I don’t want to reprint anything long-form- this book needs to be held. However, please know that Black Deer and Glass Deer, respectively; red foxes and hares exist in pitch-black woods, with the sound of their breaking bones are the only things you hear.
Right, so go read this.
And after you read this, listen to these:
Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
Black Antlers
The Ape of Naples
(specifically Fire of the Mind)
October 31, 2024
Everything has to go somewhere. Where the things have no home they move into us who have open cracks.
It was a trance of unravelling.
Like you can't move till the utter process of change is completed. Like you are a flower made of silver blades unfurling to become a moon and a reflection of the moon in a dark pothole. The abandoned city square is the last place to exist in limbo, and the surface of its celebration is flawed, like the face you see in the still water.
The finest poetry collection of my existence.
October 2, 2021
"Colors are falling, sharp rain is falling out of the ribcage skies. Rain fractals are falling out of the rainbow cathedrals.
I think I'm maybe crying, the ages rush through me and the tree catches on me. Now the grass is crawling beneath me and if I put out the cigarette I will harm things. Here the ground twists in curves, rises sinks in ribcages of breaths and are buried in the earth's lungs."
I think I'm maybe crying, the ages rush through me and the tree catches on me. Now the grass is crawling beneath me and if I put out the cigarette I will harm things. Here the ground twists in curves, rises sinks in ribcages of breaths and are buried in the earth's lungs."
July 12, 2019
Moments of transformative brilliance marred by usually mismatched verbal strategies, unlike With Deer, lack of scientific feeling, and a boring reading of Bataille. Images of what it might've been had it transcended language and old-timey surrealism constituting a brilliant aesthetic launching point.
November 13, 2023
god aase berg is TAKING it (or has been since 1997 but i was not even a material body)! rapidly become one of my favorite contemporary poets, dark matter was another one sitting read like with deer. i am frankly obsessed with these apocalyptic necropastorals in the dream space. i wanna be her so bad!
May 3, 2019
Exceptional; and yes, elements of this comes as confessional (in the way Rupi Kaur might), but the difference I think lies in employment of style and language. Also, I'm a sucker for suggestion, and this has that in spades.
February 21, 2021
Tyckte mycket om denna äckliga poesi om mörkrets materia, födelsen och döden! Vackert! Inspirerande!
Read
December 3, 2021Not at all sure what it was that I read—but it was not unenjoyable.
Want to read
April 14, 2023Thought I read this...?
Read
September 19, 2024Oo hjälp, otroligt!
Read
August 11, 2013I want it all--everything of Berg translated & in one place.
There's a tonal shift from Berg's first translated work--With Deer--as this moves more from post apocalyptic horror to drawing on science fiction in how it telescopes from the body (With Deer being radically body centered, the prose rarely escaping the agony of the body in change or that agony always refocalizing) outward into architectures, cities, seas, planets. Here ecopoetic resonances are stronger--models of matter which emphasis importance of the clinamen, the swerve of all matter out of itself, and nested breathtaking layers of flow. This could be called entropy or here in the positive-negative formation of dark matter. What's fascinating and original is how those kind of "heavy metal" inflections invest & complicate this with value:
"Matter is pure evil,
deformity pure will;" (149)
"search machines gnaw dig, drill the ether steel through
the empty Nothing's non matter
which obscures and bans me from death" (97)
& sometimes shit just gets beautifully weird. From "Herbaphrodite":
Thickets of vine ensnare cathedrals, the foliage of dark herbs climbs along the beams, far-leafed hortensia and anemones, radiant coral animals, most moray eels."
See also use neologisms, deformity, utopic possibility--
There's a tonal shift from Berg's first translated work--With Deer--as this moves more from post apocalyptic horror to drawing on science fiction in how it telescopes from the body (With Deer being radically body centered, the prose rarely escaping the agony of the body in change or that agony always refocalizing) outward into architectures, cities, seas, planets. Here ecopoetic resonances are stronger--models of matter which emphasis importance of the clinamen, the swerve of all matter out of itself, and nested breathtaking layers of flow. This could be called entropy or here in the positive-negative formation of dark matter. What's fascinating and original is how those kind of "heavy metal" inflections invest & complicate this with value:
"Matter is pure evil,
deformity pure will;" (149)
"search machines gnaw dig, drill the ether steel through
the empty Nothing's non matter
which obscures and bans me from death" (97)
& sometimes shit just gets beautifully weird. From "Herbaphrodite":
Thickets of vine ensnare cathedrals, the foliage of dark herbs climbs along the beams, far-leafed hortensia and anemones, radiant coral animals, most moray eels."
See also use neologisms, deformity, utopic possibility--
December 4, 2013
After Transfer Fat blew my mind earlier this year, I've been meaning to read more Aase Berg. So I bought a copy of Dark Matter at the newly-opened Malvern Books in Austin during the Texas Book Festival and devoured it last night and this morning.
This collection reads like an unsettling sci-fi horror movie, like Tarkovsky's "Stalker." The imagery and word pairings are disconcerting, jarring, unsettling, and the story arc is an out-of-this-world apocalypticism. Fell in love with Berg's insane wordplay in Transfer Fat and I'm glad to see it's still at work here (especially her mashing-together of otherwise unconnected words, like "grainboundaryskin" (!). It is so, so good. I love Berg.
From "On the Edge Between Discs of How Things Really Work"
This collection reads like an unsettling sci-fi horror movie, like Tarkovsky's "Stalker." The imagery and word pairings are disconcerting, jarring, unsettling, and the story arc is an out-of-this-world apocalypticism. Fell in love with Berg's insane wordplay in Transfer Fat and I'm glad to see it's still at work here (especially her mashing-together of otherwise unconnected words, like "grainboundaryskin" (!). It is so, so good. I love Berg.
From "On the Edge Between Discs of How Things Really Work"
How do I meet the gaze of another matter-machine?
There and here borders cut between different ways of being
a life form. I, with my silhouette: without becoming a tree
I dare to rest here beneath the tree. This endless faith in rims,
edges, cutting points and the loyalty of objects. With an
endless trust in the silhouettes, in that the straps and
cuts, the stitches will hold things in place.
Out of a trust in matter.
In this exact light. In this temporarily prevailing landscape.
May 31, 2024
Honestly seemed like a series of disconnected science / engineering terms intermingled with phrases that intended to evoke emotion, but ultimately left me feeling nothing.
February 14, 2016
Berg may be the H.R. Giger of surrealist poets, and I dig his horrific and scientific vocabulary, like visions of a futuristic Inferno on another planet. So while I like those colors and textures, I'm not so fond of the paint strokes, the syntactical choices. There seems to be no consideration of sound, prosody, or the collisions of phrases in most cases. That being said, "On the Edge Between Discs of How Things Really Work" stands up to all scrutiny, and "Aniara" is a brilliant convulsion. Perhaps further readings will mutate my thought processes to conform.
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