ABOUT THIS BOOK

A new and singular translation of an award-winning author and poet

Norwegian poet Kristin Berget’s 2017 Brage Prize–nominated poetry collection and when the light comes it will be so fantastic weaves together themes of ecological and linguistic loss, memory and deep time, and motherhood and grief. Berget’s poetics point to landscapes used as sites of extraction, where exhausted phosphorus, starving clay layers, and forest machines are encountered. The poems in this collection traverse forests, deserts, and seas—their poetic matter separated by fields of caesuras, visual absences suggestive of Earth’s ongoing extinctions. As jurors of the Brage Prize commented, within these pages is a universe where humans can seldom be separated from one another or from the nature they live in and among. Berget’s first book translated into English is an innovative exploration of the climate crises we are living with today and the complex emotions that ebb and flow along with it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

KRISTIN BERGET made her poetry debut in 2007 with loosing louise. She has since published six poetry collections as well as the novel Sonja Sacre Cæur. She is the recipient of the Triztan Vindtorn Poetry Prize, the Stig Sæterbakken Memorial Prize, and the Tanum Women’s Scholarship. Berget’s poetry has been translated into several languages. This is her first collection translated into English.

KATHLEEN MARIS PALTRINERI is a poet-translator from Iowa and the recipient of a 2021–22 Fulbright fellowship to Norway for translation research. For her own poetry, Paltrineri has received scholarships and residencies from USF Verftet, Arctic Circle Residency, and more. Paltrineri’s poems have recently appeared in Bone Bouquet, Bennington Review, CALYX, and jubilat.

REVIEWS

Named a Notable Translation of 2025 by World Literature Today

“With the current climate crisis haunting the book, the ethical stakes could not be clearer or higher—but this is not a collection, as you can tell from the title, that is solely about the catastrophe. Berget’s aesthetic project is unique in its attempt to glimpse potential rebirth from destruction.” —Asymptote

“Berget’s collection abounds with evocations of disparate landscapes, with sudden shifts in tone embedded in the mix. Paltrineri’s afterword on the process of translating these poems is especially insightful about both the act of translation and what makes Berget’s verse stand out to begin with.” —Words Without Borders

“Kathleen Maris Paltrineri has listened carefully to the music of the original and found ways to create a music in English as well.” —RHINO Poetry

“Aesthetically and philosophically compelling, this poetry is stimulating, sonically rich, and semantically complex. Berget offers room for a persuasive and leavening tenderness that speaks to the wider vulnerability of all life, doing so in a way that never strikes this reader as naive or avoidant. Heart wrenching and yet unstinting, this book offers a good example of what Ray Brassier calls ‘the annihilating positivity of reason’ in the face of life’s inevitable extinction. Kathleen Maris Paltrineri's remarkable translation is as inventive, harrowing, and uplifting as the original.” —Gabriel Gudding, author of Literature for Nonhumans

“Word by word, Berget’s ecopoetry is like waterdrops falling from icicles, turning the jagged and hard matter of environmental degradation into pure light before disappearing into earth. Paltrineri’s translation is breathtakingly poetic and precise.” —Aron Aji, translator of Bilge Karasu, The Garden of the Departed Cats

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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