Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! On June 10, we’ll be discussing A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, a collection by contemporary Icelandic poet Brynja Hjálmsdóttir that has been hailed as “peculiar and unforgettable,” “strange and compelling,” and “deeply weird,” and whose translation by Rachel Britton was the recipient of ASF’s 2023 Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize.

In A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, one woman lives in a glass ball that is being shaken by someone else. This book of poems, however, is always shaking itself up, leaping between the extreme and the daily, the gross and the delicious, between being scared and being scary. These surreal, visceral, and somehow polite poems explore what it can be like to be a woman and to slither through and away from threat to find voice and form and power, no matter how strange. The apocalyptic utopia we arrive at in this book—The Whore’s City—is a perfect model to move to in one’s head: feminist, funny, odd, and a little disgusting, all towards transformation.

A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder is available in paperback from Circumference Books, from Asterism Books, and from Amazon.

Nordic Book Club Online meets virtually via Zoom.