Mats Söderlund on Eskatos & The Stretched Necks of Stillness with Forrest Gander

Mats Söderlund celebrates his award-winning English-language debut, Eskatos & the Stretched Necks of Stillness, translated by Olivia Olsen, with Forrest Gander

In a sweeping but intimate blend of ecopoetry, mythology, and political verse, Eskatos & the Stretched Necks of Stillness communes with Sweden’s primeval woodlands during an age of transformation. These collected poems lead the reader down overgrown paths, beyond the flickering of leaves and lichen, to meet the dead: a troop of scattering spirits that Söderlund sets out to praise, and to mourn. Shining of rain and gnawing of sorrow, cast from stone, frost, surgical nails, and charcoal ash, Söderlund’s hypnotic ode forms a fragile tether to a world and past that threatens to slip through our fingers, and which no generation who seeks to survive can disclaim.