World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors:
Selected Prose Poems
Carsten René Nielsen
Translated from the Danish by David Keplinger & the Author

“Carsten René Nielsen has reinvented the prose poem as a revelation in a paragraph. His world, skillfully Englished by translator David Keplinger, is full of surprising creatures and equally surprising emotions. Nielsen is a master who deserves to be better known outside his native Denmark.”

       —Zack Rogow, editor and artistic director, Two Lines: World Writing in Translation

From the translator's note:

Born in 1966, Nielsen works as a full time writer in Aarhus, the second largest Danish city, an academic and cultural center located on the peninsula of Jutland. Aarhus is also the home of the Grauballe Man, a bog man 2000 years old and displayed year round at Moesgaard Museum in a wooded area south of the city. This man, his cut open throat, his fractured shin, his beard stubble, his skin—even his fingerprints—preserved by the tannins of the bog, though flattened by its tremendous weight, lies displayed under glass, a ghastly testament to our common tribal past. I find in Nielsen's poems a similar spectacle—the little glass box of form, and, within, something old, nasty, fascinating, human.

"Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen confines his poems to one tight paragraph, a highly constructed and mesmerizing window onto the world."

       —The Bloomsbury Review, March/April 2008

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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