Poetry

House Inspections

by Carsten René Nielsen, David Keplinger

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

$16.00

About the Author

Carsten René Nielsen

Born in 1966, Carsten René Nielsen is the Danish author of nine books of poetry, including his most recent translated collection, House Inspections (BOA Editions, 2011). His selected prose poems, The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors, was published in English by New Issues Poetry and Prose in 2007 and translated along with House Inspections by David Keplinger. Nielsen's work has been featured in magazines in Italy, Germany, Canada and the US, and he has been awarded the Michael Strunge Poetry Prize and several fellowships from the Danish State Foundation for the Arts. Nielsen lives in Aarhus, Denmark.

David Keplinger

David Keplinger is the author of three books of poetry. His book The Prayers of Others won the 2006 Colorado Book Award. Keplinger’s translation of prose poems by Carsten René Nielsen, House Inspections, was published by BOA Editions in 2011. He is the recipient of the T. S. Eliot Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Danish Arts Council. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C.