By Kim Simonsen
Translated by Randi Ward
Winner of the Faroese National Book Award
Winner of the Nadia Christensen Prize for translation
Nordic Council Literature Prize nominee Kim Simonsen introduces a new poetics to Faroese literature rooted in natural history, philosophy, and the materiality of all things.
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Paperback: 9781646053728
eBook: 9781646053858
Description
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.
Biographical Information
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.
Reviews
Winner of the Faroese National Book Award
Winner of the Nadia Christensen Prize for Translation
“Luminous and arresting, like the islands themselves.” —Martin Aitken, award-winning translator of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star
“The vulnerability of being alive at such a pivotal period in Earth’s history underpins this highly original, compact collection from Kim Simonsen, superbly translated by Randi Ward.” —Michael Favala Goldman, translator of Tove Ditlevsen’s The Trouble with Happiness
“A collection for those who loved Inger Christensen’s alphabet, Kim Simonsen’s What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium, translated by Randi Ward, has a resounding scientific soulfulness. Straightforward in its assessment of humanity’s likely future in the face of climate change, shadowed by our devastating choices, the book nevertheless finds a kind of wonder in the hard shapes of what can be known. The poems play with scale, moving through deep time and across the breadth of the universe, then pulling the focus to, for instance, a black coffee pot with a silvered spout. This wonderful mechanism brings to mind Tomas Tranströmer, and can create the effect of an almost dizzying metaphysics, or a humor marked by the bathos of humanity itself: “Among a hundred billion galaxies,/ with a hundred billion stars in each… those glasses/ make you look like Woody Allen.” English speakers owe a debt of gratitude to Randi Ward, who brings us these poems from the Faroese with the kind of confidence, deftness, and attention only a poet can give to another poet. Her translation is itself a work of art alongside Simonsen’s, and both are worthy of praise.” —Katie Farris, award-winning author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
“Kim Simonsen delivers with emotionally charged, poignant poems about heartache and humankind’s place in nature.” —Molly Balsby, Ekstra Bladet
“A moving poetry collection that places time measured in millennia, the galaxies of the universe, our little planet with its view of the sun, and one lonely human being’s immense sorrow into mutual perspective.” —Frederik Schøler, LitteraturNu