Olsen, Ursula Andkjær: Third-Millennium Heart

Third-Millennium Heart by Ursula Andkjær Olsen. Translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Action Books, paperback) Publication Date: September 15, 2017 Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Women's Studies. Winner of the 2018 National Translation Award in Poetry. With black humor and cutting logic, THIRD-MILLENNIUM HEART explores the confounding nature of power and desire, the problem of asserting a feminist alternative without recapitulating patriarchal power structures: "The goal is to weaken every trace of odor. It will cost me my victory scent." Yet Olsen's ambivalence entails an embryonic potential: uncoupled from all normative arrivals, her syntax sprouts with mutant possibility, one nimbly conveyed by translator Jensen's flexible touch. From the darkness of this "comajubilation," in a stutter-step of declarations and retractions, THIRD MILLENNIUM HEART is a work of radical re-conjuration: "Together we will beat / in the great DELTA." A co-publication with Broken Dimanche Press