OUTGOING VESSEL, by Ursula Andkjær Olsen / translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen / Action Books, 2021
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Proof, hosanna, proof. Oh, my discarded bits of avoidance. Is ghost still held as a breath in a being that cannot materialize until it’s misplaced by our up and coming carrier? I think it’s all there, all here, in the anti-instructional humbleharm and worldless afterlife of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel. So bare and terrifying, so saturated and self-afflicted. I can’t say what the verse here is cleaning, nor what the competing repetitions are being fed by, but it moves me to condone guilt and permit that I’m the youngest thing about myself. These are poetics that reject the reimagining of the under-imagined and instead chant themselves through songdoors might they create origins to be upheld by the pregnant deceivers of elevation. I might not have it right. What if renewal came first? Is there a machine built by grief that manufactures alienation? Crossed-over and crossed-out, this is scarily disappeared and necessary stuff.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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