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Third-Millennium Heart
2018 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD WINNER (US)
2018 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD FINALIST (US)
“From a distance established through sparse text and guttural truth, Olsen, through Jensen’s imaginative feats of translation, confronts us with an unsparing, lucid world view.”
—Harvard Review
"Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s compelling work travels through dark chambers of desire, power, and creation, conjuring up a feminist space where culture and nature wage war with one another, where psychology and anatomy merge to create a uniquely modern mytho-poetics. Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s masterful translation has a strong rhythm all its own, and captures the book’s jarring quality in a remarkably smooth rendering. By the end of this insidious text, the reader is just as “namedrunk” as the book’s enigmatic lyrical subject, and discovers that their own “heartspace,” too, has been torn open, dissected, and beautifully recreated."
—Judges' Citation, 2018 National Translation Award
With black humor and cutting logic, Third-Millennium Heart explores the confounding nature of power and desire, the problem of asserting a feminist alternative without recapitulating patriarchal power structures: “The goal is to weaken every trace of odor. It will cost me my victory scent.” Yet Olsen’s ambivalence entails an embryonic potential: uncoupled from all normative arrivals, her syntax sprouts with mutant possibility, one nimbly conveyed by translator Jensen’s flexible touch. From the darkness of this “comajubilation,” in a stutter-step of declarations and retractions, Third-Millennium Heart is a work of radical re-conjuration: “Together we will beat/in the great DELTA.”
PRAISE FOR THIRD-MILLENNIUM HEART
“Like a supercollider smashing together exotic subatomic particles just to see what happens, Olsen accelerates language to the very limits, detonating it to watch what knowledge comes forth from ecstasy.”
—The Believer
“Olsen reminds us through her language that what we think of as natural may, in fact, be the technical; the science of ourselves is renewed in these poems.”
—Words Without Borders
“This intoxicating and terrifying poem (or many poems) is a meditation humming with repeated mantras of feminist poetics, words inside of words inside of pages inside of the book held inside your hands.”
—Kenyon Review
“Olsen’s writing has a way of dislodging one’s sense of self-possession; we look up from her book at a world that seems stranger, more beautiful and far more alarming—than before we started reading it.“
—The Quarterly Conversation
"I would love for everyone to read this book—I am advocating for its circulation. At the same time, the book doesn’t need us to read it in order for it to be alive. We need to be alive to it."
—Best Translated Book Award judge Aditi Machado
2018 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD FINALIST (US)
“From a distance established through sparse text and guttural truth, Olsen, through Jensen’s imaginative feats of translation, confronts us with an unsparing, lucid world view.”
—Harvard Review
"Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s compelling work travels through dark chambers of desire, power, and creation, conjuring up a feminist space where culture and nature wage war with one another, where psychology and anatomy merge to create a uniquely modern mytho-poetics. Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s masterful translation has a strong rhythm all its own, and captures the book’s jarring quality in a remarkably smooth rendering. By the end of this insidious text, the reader is just as “namedrunk” as the book’s enigmatic lyrical subject, and discovers that their own “heartspace,” too, has been torn open, dissected, and beautifully recreated."
—Judges' Citation, 2018 National Translation Award
With black humor and cutting logic, Third-Millennium Heart explores the confounding nature of power and desire, the problem of asserting a feminist alternative without recapitulating patriarchal power structures: “The goal is to weaken every trace of odor. It will cost me my victory scent.” Yet Olsen’s ambivalence entails an embryonic potential: uncoupled from all normative arrivals, her syntax sprouts with mutant possibility, one nimbly conveyed by translator Jensen’s flexible touch. From the darkness of this “comajubilation,” in a stutter-step of declarations and retractions, Third-Millennium Heart is a work of radical re-conjuration: “Together we will beat/in the great DELTA.”
PRAISE FOR THIRD-MILLENNIUM HEART
“Like a supercollider smashing together exotic subatomic particles just to see what happens, Olsen accelerates language to the very limits, detonating it to watch what knowledge comes forth from ecstasy.”
—The Believer
“Olsen reminds us through her language that what we think of as natural may, in fact, be the technical; the science of ourselves is renewed in these poems.”
—Words Without Borders
“This intoxicating and terrifying poem (or many poems) is a meditation humming with repeated mantras of feminist poetics, words inside of words inside of pages inside of the book held inside your hands.”
—Kenyon Review
“Olsen’s writing has a way of dislodging one’s sense of self-possession; we look up from her book at a world that seems stranger, more beautiful and far more alarming—than before we started reading it.“
—The Quarterly Conversation
"I would love for everyone to read this book—I am advocating for its circulation. At the same time, the book doesn’t need us to read it in order for it to be alive. We need to be alive to it."
—Best Translated Book Award judge Aditi Machado
210 pages, Paperback
First published October 5, 2012
5 people are currently reading
204 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 16, 2017
A sprawling and brash manifesto that reads the networks of modern life as organic (bodies circulated in, orbiting around, the third-millenium heart). As the poem accrues bodies and concepts, the poems get more exciting, sharp, and personal. The relationships between the distinct bodies become muddy in a way that really made the emodiment/transformation suggested by the title come to life. I read it quickly and I found a real and satisfying sense of climax toward the end of the book as everything gets muddier and messier.
Also, the equivalencies and forumlas strewn throughout the brought to mind the idea of the mesh from Timothy Morton's the Ecological Thought. Also, a recommended companion piece to this is Sarah Vapp's Viability.
Also, the equivalencies and forumlas strewn throughout the brought to mind the idea of the mesh from Timothy Morton's the Ecological Thought. Also, a recommended companion piece to this is Sarah Vapp's Viability.
March 15, 2018
But the refining of loneliness has begun, it’s going to be a
castle; it will become your castle that
can later gain two towers, can later lose one,
two walls. – {from} the section DARLING GLORIA
In reading, then re-reading, Third-Millennium Heart, by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, I scratched, beneath other penciled-in marginalia, two things: perhaps I have avoided myself into existence and he takes a holiday as something maternal to do with your time. This book has goals for its body language, and, with a claustrophobic sparseness, seems a first for finality. These are entries written in the surroundings of your outer-sibling, where a red pacifier suns itself in a dream some hole is having about my mouth. Your mouth. I don’t know. There is a nobody and, as a nobody, she will name identity. I think some of these passages, here, were changed by the reader.
As a thing propelled by its inability to continue, Third-Millennium Heart is a terrifying, and lovingly unreliable, work by a writer acutely aware of the obliviousness in self and in other. It carries itself with a chronological intelligence, is joyous, and deepens all things ahistoric with its unsleeping and uprooted verse. As a pair, Ursula Andkjær Olsen and Katrine Øgaard Jensen awaken the moment, are alive to scarcity.
castle; it will become your castle that
can later gain two towers, can later lose one,
two walls. – {from} the section DARLING GLORIA
In reading, then re-reading, Third-Millennium Heart, by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, I scratched, beneath other penciled-in marginalia, two things: perhaps I have avoided myself into existence and he takes a holiday as something maternal to do with your time. This book has goals for its body language, and, with a claustrophobic sparseness, seems a first for finality. These are entries written in the surroundings of your outer-sibling, where a red pacifier suns itself in a dream some hole is having about my mouth. Your mouth. I don’t know. There is a nobody and, as a nobody, she will name identity. I think some of these passages, here, were changed by the reader.
As a thing propelled by its inability to continue, Third-Millennium Heart is a terrifying, and lovingly unreliable, work by a writer acutely aware of the obliviousness in self and in other. It carries itself with a chronological intelligence, is joyous, and deepens all things ahistoric with its unsleeping and uprooted verse. As a pair, Ursula Andkjær Olsen and Katrine Øgaard Jensen awaken the moment, are alive to scarcity.
May 24, 2018
This strange, stirring collection of poems form a haunting post-human epic. I read it slowly, my copy is filled with notes and markers. Now to prepare a response/review for publication.
My review, an experimental response to this book, is now live at https://minorliteratures.com/2018/05/...
My review, an experimental response to this book, is now live at https://minorliteratures.com/2018/05/...
September 18, 2017
What dude would ever have imagined that reading a feminist treatise could be so much fun? Not this dude. And yet I did. And it was.
October 15, 2018
"The goal is for my pain to be a phantom, for nothing real to have caused it:
that’s the only realistic painkiller available."
"Separation is required before we can meet, and we
have to meet."
that’s the only realistic painkiller available."
"Separation is required before we can meet, and we
have to meet."
June 6, 2022
Outre, recursive, blunt, brilliant. At times it reads like a looping, slightly repetitive, body horror manifesto (which is not a complaint), but recurring themes of pregnancy, capitalism, detachment, and more gradually build into something momentous and moving over the course of about 200 pages. While it reads like one long poem, or maybe 5 or 6 pretty-long poems clear with thematic breaks and a discernible structure, don’t let the length deter you. The translated language is stellar, dark, slightly alien, and oddly punchy, and it reads like a violent breeze.
April 18, 2018
Exquisite
&
live up to its hype :)
&
live up to its hype :)
April 14, 2020
Versi brillanti. Buon pensiero all'interno di una pandemia e del capitalismo in fase avanzata. Lo amavo.
April 24, 2022
Visceral! Gutting! Wow.
December 17, 2018
Du er mit
fremmedlegerne
navnlegerne
sagnlegerne
lavnlegerne
Hvis din død er meningsløs, må det være, fordi du er meining, og din
forsvinden ville være forsvinden af mening, dér i mit fjerne indre, dér,
dér rinder meinung ud, rinder rose, navn
ud.
Min urin har lugtet mærkelig skarpt de seneste dage.
fremmedlegerne
navnlegerne
sagnlegerne
lavnlegerne
Hvis din død er meningsløs, må det være, fordi du er meining, og din
forsvinden ville være forsvinden af mening, dér i mit fjerne indre, dér,
dér rinder meinung ud, rinder rose, navn
ud.
Min urin har lugtet mærkelig skarpt de seneste dage.
Read
June 5, 2021I had the great privilege of reading with this author at the Ottawa Verses International Poetry Festival a few years back. Stunning reading of a gloriously stimulating book of poems: at once searing and rather funny; the translation, propulsive; the syntax is the thing. Beautiful. Rewards re-reading. XRSS
April 5, 2021
I want more than just love: I want
to become an army, become water
I
must penetrate everything.
I want what I am pregnant with, all that
a human can be pregnant with
to become an army, become water
—'The Idea of Red', p125
to become an army, become water
I
must penetrate everything.
I want what I am pregnant with, all that
a human can be pregnant with
to become an army, become water
—'The Idea of Red', p125
April 16, 2023
took me too long to really get into it and the formatting drove me insane.
November 26, 2023
well this was overstimulating. but yass queen fuck capitalism and fuck the patriarchy!!
September 2, 2025
de kan dette med dikting disse dansker
December 23, 2012
Den er svær. Rigtig svær. For en simpel fyr som mig.
Bølger lidt op og ned og frem og tilbage. Der er nogle højdepunkter både før og efter midten et sted, men de er lidt svære at placere - og fastholde. Det er garanteret meningen fra forfatterens side, for hun er så sat... dygtig.
Helt klart fire stjerner, hvis jeg forstod mere. Må læse den igen senere.
'Skønheden hænger på træerne' er stadig favorit.
Bølger lidt op og ned og frem og tilbage. Der er nogle højdepunkter både før og efter midten et sted, men de er lidt svære at placere - og fastholde. Det er garanteret meningen fra forfatterens side, for hun er så sat... dygtig.
Helt klart fire stjerner, hvis jeg forstod mere. Må læse den igen senere.
'Skønheden hænger på træerne' er stadig favorit.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews