Friends with Everyone

Gunnar Wærness (trans. Gabriel Gudding)

Leading Norwegian poet Gunnar Wærness has been called a “punk” poet and a “wizard” whose poetry is a “vortex of precision and musicality” that moves in “surprising, disturbing and at times incomprehensible ways.” With Friends with Everyone, Wærness has written a monstrous book about spirit, speech and empire, migration and grief, belonging and freedom, language attrition and the ideological capture of literature. Filled with psychopomps, ghouls, giants, medieval song, the heron of forgetfulness, stepfamilies, flowers confiding in us, and babies speaking from bonfires, it is suffused with a gothic panpsychism. Translated by poet Gabriel Gudding with an ear attuned to the absurdities of intimacy, and vice versa, Friends with Everyone may just tell the story of speech itself.