Waitress in Fall

For over three decades, Kristín Ómarsdóttir's poetry has thrived in the vanguard of Icelandic literature. Waitress in Fall offers anglophone readers the first substantial selection of her poems in translation. Spanning thirty years and seven collections, from her first to her latest, this is a wide-reaching introduction to a vital voice of contemporary European poetry.

Kristín's work resists the sweet, the neat or the certain. Her poems delight in the lush mess of actual life, in its hands and fingers, lemons and clocks, socks, soldiers, snow, mothers, knives, nightstands, sweat and crockery. If the domestic is at the heart of the work, it is a domesticity tinged with threat. Something ‘clear and ominous’ is taking shape between the lines. Images of placid mid-century housewifery confront a wildness pulsing below the surface, a womanhood at once natural and supernatural – of evening dresses woven from twigs, necklaces strung with worms, and socks knitted from saliva.

These are surreal, unsettling landscapes, in which children lap milk from trees and car tires are ‘soft as skin’. But Kristín's poems are also full of laughter, sex, and love. They accept vulnerability as a condition of intimacy. Erupting ‘wherever thirst is ignited’, they are not afraid to strike, to rage, recognising a right – a responsibility – to risk the necessary word, ‘to wound the language’.