A new and singular translation of an award-winning author and poet
 
Norwegian poet Kristin Berget’s 2017 Brage Prize–nominated poetry collection and when the light comes it will be so fantastic weaves together themes of ecological and linguistic loss, memory and deep time, and motherhood and grief. Berget’s poetics point to landscapes used as sites of extraction, where exhausted phosphorus, starving clay layers, and forest machines are encountered. The poems in this collection traverse forests, deserts, and seas—their poetic matter separated by fields of caesuras, visual absences suggestive of Earth’s ongoing extinctions. As jurors of the Brage Prize commented, within these pages is a universe where humans can seldom be separated from one another or from the nature they live in and among. Berget’s first book translated into English is an innovative exploration of the climate crises we are living with today and the complex emotions that ebb and flow along with it.

KRISTIN BERGET made her poetry debut in 2007 with loosing louise. The author of seven poetry collections in Norwegian, as well as the novel Sonja Sacre Cœur, she has been nominated for numerous literary awards, including the Brage Prize in 2017.
 
KATHLEEN MARIS PALTRINERI is a poet-translator from Iowa and the recipient of a 2021–22 Fulbright fellowship to Norway for translation research. For her own poetry, Paltrineri has received scholarships and residencies from USF Verftet, Arctic Circle Residency, and more. Paltrineri’s poems have recently appeared in Bone Bouquet, Bennington Review, CALYX, and jubilat.

Poems
Translator’s Note
Acknowledgments