MA

Ida Börjel

MA, Ida Börjel’s award-winning abecedarian, is a maelstrom of voices cast in the underwater shadows and nuclear light of the Anthropocene. A refraction of Inger Christensen’s seminal Alphabet, published in 1981, MA speaks a furious incantation in the past tense, a grammar of loss, from the vantage point of a disintegrating here and now. Appearing for the first time in English in Jennifer Hayashida’s luminous translation, MA is less a curative than a testimonial, speaking simultaneously for the one and the many, the solitary mother and the insurgent multitude.