With Deer

by Aase Berg, Johannes Goransson (Translator)

In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Aase Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche--pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror.

With Deer [Hos rådjur] was Berg's first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1997.

Genres: Poetry, Horror, Womens

93 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Poet, fiction writer, critic, translator, and one of the founding members of the Stockholm Surrealist Group.

Reviews

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bizarre, discomfiting, occasionally revolting, oppressively dour on the surface but subtly funny in its own way, With Deer is a book of short prose poems unlike much of anything. What ostensibly looks like a collection of nature poems—most revolve around animals—is instead a book of alien ecology, body horror, dissolution and recombination of physical forms into unsettling mutations, and a constant embrace of the absurd. The language serves a different purpose than most lyrical poetry; there’s an inherent ugliness that matches the subject matter. Words are often smashed together to form new and inexplicable hybrids. Sometimes a phrase will repeat, and it’s not clear why. In fact the “why” of the book feels like an unnecessary question; I wouldn’t read this in hopes of unlocking secrets. The book itself is a secret; it’s a translated work that feels like an untranslated work built from repurposed English, where the usual signifiers are warped almost beyond comprehension. Instead of rational (or even poetic) thought, witty aphorisms, or clean lines, we get mutilated seals that are not seals but something bulging and sac-like; ruined flesh and odd tendrils probing for life to absorb; recurring themes of decay and reinvention, wounds and transformation.

I wouldn’t recommend this to most readers. If you’re in a weird enough headspace, you may be struck by the audacity, the absurdity, and the persistent darkness. Though I haven’t read much else like this, it might appeal to fans of the Jeff Vandermeer’s more experimental books, like Dead Astronauts, where the narrative falls away and you just dwell in the weird (he blurbed one of Berg’s later books). Recommended to the right reader in the wrong mood.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...it seems like the metals of this powerful city are exploding with anxiety...”

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorannson's translation of Aase Berg's With Deer keeps its visceral and horror over-tones while also keeping the surreal lyrics in Berg's (mostly) prose-based poetry maintained. The natural world's violence is rendered in gory detail over and over, and the reader can have the effect of having deer blood rain on them in waves. Berg treats the natural world as kind to the violence threatened to the female body in pop culture but takes it too lyrical extremes. It's definitely a memorable as a first collection.

[steffi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where one by one you turned my faces up
toward the sun's surface
and drank them like deer water

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

What the hell did I just read?

That being said, could not put it down

[Jay Paine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m impressed. Before With Deer poetry has never made me feel physically nauseated, but with its visceral descriptions such as the “lily’s black vein” & odd images like “meat dough and guinea pig loaf,” among many more moments, this prose collection stuns & stings the reader.

Regarding genre, With Deer is a compelling whirlpool of horror, surrealism, & fabulism. Many of the poems have a fairytale quality. Woodland settings dominate the landscape, though sometimes our necks are snapped back to gaze upon the dark sky. In “Hypotenuse,” this once mathematical term is fashioned anew to strangle the galaxy Andromeda.

While the collection as a whole holds up, I did find myself getting a little bored toward the end. I think the shock I experienced at the beginning wore off a little, but overall this collection intrigued me.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not nearly as good as Transfer Fat or Dark Matter (which are both, in their own, very different ways, almost perfect I think), but still worth checking out especially if you enjoy Berg. In general, I think this feels like a less developed Dark Matter, but it's interesting to see Berg work with organic materials rather than cold machines. I'd recommend her other books first but (especially considering how quick of a read it is) this is definitely helpful to round off and help understand her body of work. Especially if you pick it up first rather than last like I did.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is some dark, creepy, plagued ink splashes and Berg brings horrors from nature’s darkest corners, from the bellies of animals and splatters them in heaping teaspoons of things unheard of.

Not as good as “Dark Matter” another collection by Aase Berg but the orange cover screams, “read me!”

Some standouts for me...

-The Gristle Day
-Mastiff
-Song Lake
-Jam
-We Thread Up Lizards

[Krysta Sa · Rating 5 out of 5]

messy, slimy, shiny and glowing, in a cancer mouth.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange, surreal, creepy, lovely, frightening, and dark.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The excellent thing about this book is that it’s gothic, overwrought, and ridiculous (decadent? Baroque?) cover to cover. These poems don't live in a hum-drum world that's sometimes, melodramatically, punctured by the horrible. They live in an inverted world where things without shape or skin are devouring each other all the time.

What seems initially absurd--

"The gorge is swarming with guinea pigs."

--taps into weirdly fundamental anxieties

"...She gives birth and groans, she moans and bleeds. Everywhere the membranes, everywhere their bloated puff bellies. We run with the heart in the tunnel, you and I, while nervous systems break down behind us, while the amniotic fluid surges in the pumping, pulsing chasm..."

Where some prose poems have fun transforming one thing into another--here's a turtle--Poof--it's a hat!--these seem to confront us with the liminal. It's figures seem mutated, change is painful, uncontrollable--

"...His hands sank into her as if into clay, which amorphously and muddily enclosed in his soft stumps. The girl could no longer be distinguished from the whining animal. The creature got up on its legs and wobbled across the slippery floor. Again a kind of moan rose toward the brown skies..."

The language plugged right into my animal brain. Couldn't put it down.

[Blurp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nature feminized as the female body, but with all the dangers of a well-researched neo-Darwinian apocalyptic. This is a sad feminist tale told in prose poems (mostly) about decaying, being violated, getting slimed like in 'Ghostbusters', having your period, animals being gross and unresponsive, and trying to find your place in what James Brown chauvinistically referred to as 'a man's world'. She uses lots of anaphora to setup and knockdown 'shocking' images of like a bloody seal or a puke or some phlegm or something. It's very surreal stuff, translated from the Swedish, of which I know none. It has en face Swedish and English, so you can try to parse that if you would choose. There are some powerful sections that are, to me, very sad in the powerlessness they convey in the face of a pretty cold and dirty nature. There are some other sections that are just kind of corny shock-verbiage about menses and mud and stuff like that. I read it a couple times and I got a lot of the echoes of Vallejo, Cesaire, the Bible, Blake and maybe Clayton Eshleman. I think her effort to hyper-masculinize the experience of femininity as a target for base natures and base nature worked for me, in that all the poets I thought of reading her were men. Maybe I'm just really sexist. I hope not...

[KGL · Rating 5 out of 5]

More than 5 stars really 5 stars isn't excessive enough. Excessively real. As in Thomas Mann's definition of "the grotesque [as:] that which is excessively true and excessively real, not that which is arbitrary, false, irreal, and absurd."

From THE SNAIL ANCESTRY

"He could eat of the girl and had done so during certain especially desperate days. Out of the sores grew the nerves and fiber-sprouts searching. The antennae shimmered, the acheworks ground. The girl lay still and overwhelmed by the depth of muscles: between every sinew she felt the kissing tongues push through. In the slippery groove between the segments the snail tip smeared its spit. The girl lay back-broken with the face-mouth parted. . ."

[Simón · Rating 5 out of 5]

I treated myself to a Sealey Challenge packet of random books from Black Ocean. I don't think of them as specializing in translation. This title caught my eye because I'm writing a poetry collection about deer and deer hunting. Glad I chose it from the stack and grateful to read the English translation alongside the Swedish (?) because I could see the compound words being squished together unnaturally. These were very inspiring personally because the poet is pushing into the grotesque of decay, decomposition. Life appears as teeming, unrelenting, glopping. Lemmings, foxes, worms and other not-cute animals hold sway.

[Farren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surrealist cinema with an ear for language inversion, syntactical contortion (although it is a translation, so how much of that is authenticity of syntax in a different language and how much of it is the agenda of the book?) Astonishing and lovely, though not to my taste --

"Where one by one you turned my faces up
toward the sun's surface
and drank them like deer water."

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing for the depth and seriousness of its strangeness, its unflinching partnership with the grotesque, again and again. Disturbingly gross and surreal and surprising. I really began to wonder. So much blood and skin and membranes and rot. It was hard to read this while eating lunch, but I kept trying.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eight-...

[B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I brought this to a coffee shop thinking I’d read a couple pages but then I got so engrossed I couldn’t leave till I finished the entire book. Aase Berg writes the most gripping poetry I have ever encountered, so visceral it makes my skin crawl - in a good way.

[Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbing, enticing, oh so dark. Berg takes my mind to dark places and allows me to revel in the icky and dark goo of the world and my thoughts. Highly recommend!

[mallory payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

“doll doll” may be the best poem ever written.

prose poems absolutely dripping in gothic sensibilities and hallucinations. THIS is contemporary poetry
at its best and most sickening.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

These holes keep appearing. In my shirt, in the ground. A hole can be almost anything glowing with shame. Aase Berg’s With Deer is dangerous. Especially on Saturdays. Saturdays aren’t real. Johannes Göransson’s translation of With Deer is an excitement. Excitement as tower, as ruin, but also excitement as satellite. It is thrilled to have enemies, is what I mean. No matter, no matter. The lookout’s grief blips through radar after radar. Radar, before. What a bronzing of sin. I carry a snake in an insect’s dream. I look like hell in the place where my intestines meet. Inside joke, outside sorrow. I don’t know where else it happens, this inventory of squirrel loneliness, this ghost reverb of haunted autopsies. These are landmark injuries. Go there, go here, as wax figure, as mannequin. Let burial go. And throb in some groundstruck ache.

[Frida Hernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in a day. A new favorite. Personally, my favorite style of writing. It’s personal. Grotesque, goth, surreal. It’s a book you will want to reread to find the yummy details. About the perversity of nature. I really love the first part: In the Guinea Pig Cave. :) recommend if you like yummy prose. Ofc there’s narratives of violation, don’t expect to feel better.

[bell ⋆｡°✩ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this was terrifying yet spiritual. Aase Berg's imagery feels like a desolate wasteland, a surrealist painting. Some of these poems made me want to vomit or shed my skin. I will never be the same.

[reader of sorts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book so much. It's definitely a step-in-anywhere,-have-visceral-experience,-exit-when-you-can't-take-it-anymore kind of book.

The very best of its genre, which I might call Tender Slaughtercore.

[Sofia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not perfect, but one of the most comforting things I've ever read.

[Aplysia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mörk och surrealistisk med en del nyord.

[Juniperus · Rating 2 out of 5]

this had honestly no business being so disgusting

[Levi]

SHARD

Where one by one you turned my faces up toward the sun's surface
and drank them like deer water.

[Dew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh Abigail Hobbs how you would’ve enjoyed this

[John Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Aase Berg's work and can't thank Johannes enough for making her work available to us who only read English well enough to truly enter the work. This particular piece was a wonderful way to get deeper into Berg's oeuvre after encountering Remainland, though I admit I was hoping for a full-length version of another of Berg's works first. That said, I was surprised by many of the changes the translator made; I'm sure they probably made the translation more acute, but I found most of the changes made the English version a little less fluid/forceful. Granted, that might just be my perception, as I had become so used to -- and so loved -- the versions included in Remainland.

Overall, a wonderful read no one interested in contemporary poetry, particularly prose poetry, ought to miss out.

[Clark Knowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I originally gave this book three stars, but in the three days since I've finished reading With Deer, it hasn't left me. It's a strange and difficult book but underneath it's blood and rot and gristle, something is resonating with me. Or maybe it's resonating because of the blood and rot and gristle. A friend wrote to me (about this book) that it was sometimes "good to crawl through some sludge to be reminded how good it feels to be clean." That sums up my feelings about the book. I particularly like the poem "Mass"--"Now I move into the oil/now there is movement in the oil/now there is explosion in the muscle/now the star throbs/now I move through the pearl/now the tar runs out of me/now I fall into the tar/now I sink into the magma/now the darkness aches/now I sink in the dark/through myself"

I'll return to this book again later. Aase Berg is a quite compelling poet.