Tuesday, January 31, 2023








Suntaste

Rannvá Holm Mortensen
Translated by Matthew Landrum
March 2023, 9 3/4 x 12 1/2"
112 pages
$30 paperback
ISBN 978-1-7366902-7-7





     This is the first in a series of Faroese literature in translation by IPI Press. Future editions will
include a short story anthology and collections of ballads–the sung oral tradition.
     Rannvá Holm Mortensen works in the colors of the Faroe Islands: reds, grays, black, white, and
sometimes terra cotta, flesh. Her prints, collages, woodcuts and handwritten poems—
dreamscapes and nightmares—are illuminated in this reproduction of her original artists book.
     Nature, earth mother, lifeblood of sea creatures, saltwater in our arteries, dendrites and
seaweed-shaped shape-shifters. As you read, the female body dissolves into nature. One feels
porous and pulsating. There is a cry, a plea at the core of the work—tidal longing. One hears the
cavernous echoes of Frida Kahlo’s physical and emotional howls, and, as in T.S. Eliot ‘s “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the phylogeny of human existence recapitulating the ontology of
being. One fish, one child, one woman at a time.
     It’s a woman’s world, bloody, ventricular.






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