About This Title
With a dozen poems previously published in the Paris Review, Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen is already a familiar name to U.S. poetry readers. These dark prose poems - reminiscent of Charles Simic – map out a uniquely European territory with chilling, cinematic clarity.
“Promenade”
Around her people say that they are former circus princesses, that the ventricles of their hearts are completely clogged by remnants of soap and sawdust. So slowly do they move, when they are taking their poodles, these powdered tumbleweeds, out for some air, that passerine birds can be seen to alight, two or three together, on the wide shoulders of the old ladies’ coats.It sometimes happens there’s a lady who slows to a complete standstill, but if you have some change, most people will kindly place a coin or two in her tindy, gnarled hand. And then she’s up and running again.
Praise for House Inspections
“These poems do much more than blur the line between illusion and reality: they evoke that vibrant contradiction of dreaming in which the real and unreal exist in perfect simultaneity…”—Georgia Review
Publication Date: October 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-934414-56-9
© BOA Editions, Ltd. 2011