Pär Hansson was born 1970 in Vännäs in Northern Sweden. He has published six collections of poetry: Motorsågsminne / Chainsaw Memory, Vi plockarbäricivilisationen/Berrypicking Poems and Kajak/Kayak. His works has been included in anthologies and published in literary magazines in Sweden and abroad, with translations in English, Spanish, French, Slovakian, Bosnian, Serbian, Malayalam, German, Slovenian and Estonian. He is a member of Sweden’s Writers Union Board and one of the editors of the poetry fanzine Grass. He now lives in Hammarbyhöjden, Stockholm, where he organizes readings on his veranda and teaches cre- ative writing at Folk university of Gotland.

THE ROOM IS STRIPED BY LIGHT AND DARKNESS

it rocks and turns
an entire summer’s warm rays
are pressed in through the blinds
into stripes
in an opened spiral notebook in a
dusty gray eternity he stays
on the narrow sunlit fields and
tries to write but can’t
form the right flourished letters
cannot hold the pencil his hands
are transformed
into knife and fork and cannot
understand cannot comprehend in the least with these clumsy silver utensils cut cleave chop and chop
the paper into thin scraps of light

Translated from Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida and Tim Dinan