On November 3, join us for a talk on the Faroe Islands’ National Book Award-winning poetry collection What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium with Kim Simonsen and Randi Ward! The distinguished author will delve into his new poetics to Faroese literature, now out in translation from Deep Vellum Publishing, with the translator and ASF Translation Prize Winner Randi Ward.
About What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium
The rhetorical title of this collection posits the crisis that is underway. Simonsen asks: as a species among species, all composed of the matter of the universe, how has our compulsion to classify everything hierarchically estranged us from ourselves, each other, and Earth’s ecosystems? Simonsen challenges our anthropocentric pursuit of knowledge, exploring humankind’s relationship with itself as an element of the natural world. What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium follows the struggles of its narrator as he reckons with intensifying estrangement from his fellow organisms, gradually turning to the greater kinship of matter to find continuity, connection, and solace.
Kim Simonsen is a Faroese writer and publisher. He is the author of seven books, as well as numerous essays and academic articles. In 2014, Simonsen won the Faroe Islands’ National Book Award for his poetry collection What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium. His newest poetry collection was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2024.
Randi Ward is a poet, translator, lyricist, and photographer from West Virginia. She earned her MA in Cultural Studies from the University of the Faroe Islands and has twice won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Prize.