Translations

Like the trees

by Nanna Storr-Hansen
Translated from Danish by Christopher Sand-Iversen

Like the trees
I grow
upward
is it especially
human
what is it
about height
picking your way
through the
abyssal depths
when someone finally
makes you groan
now there’s enough money
I can look like a
bride
any time
you like
coddle the next
feeling
by taking notice
those hands that follow you
through the night
the spastic
line breaks
in ecstasy
coddle the next
sentence
by writing it down
a kind of
abyss
deep as a house
a kind of
salesman’s gene
that I want to tell you
how I’m feeling

Nanna Storr-Hansen, born 1991, is a Danish poet. Her debut Spektakel (Spectacle) was published in 2017, one year after her graduation from the Royal Danish Academy of Creative Writing. In 2018, her second book Mimosa followed. Mimosa was short-listed for the Danish Literary Award (Danish Critics Prize for Literature), the 2018 Montana Prize for Fiction. Her poems appear in several contemporary Danish literary magazines, and explore themes of the female body, nature, and ecofeminism.

Christopher Sand-Iversen holds a BA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA in visual culture from the University of Copenhagen. He is the director of SixtyEight Art Institute, an independent organization in Copenhagen which supports artistic and curatorial research in the field of contemporary art, as well as a founder editor of its publishing house, RSS Press. He has previously worked at several museums in Denmark, in addition to translating literature, exhibition catalogues, and academic papers into English from Danish, Swedish, and German for numerous clients. His work appears in the White Review, Asymptote, and Poetry Wales among other publications.

FROM Volume 68, Number 2

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