O

Judith Kiros (trans. Kira Joseffson)

Swedish poet Judith Kiros’s widely-acclaimed debut stretches boundaries of genre, race, and gender in an alternative production of Shakespeare’s Othello that sidesteps black death for a multitude of futures. Taking a cue from Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Kiros employs metric verve and critical bite to add to Shakespeare a wide range of historical and contemporary works, producing a meditation on blackness that sets up a new reflective surface at every turn. O marks the first translation into English of one of Sweden’s most thrilling young poets.

'Riffing off Shakespeare's Othello and ranging across all manner of the poetic and critical, Judith Kiros's O, a book about race, gender, Blackness, Sweden, colonialism and decolonization, and so much more, achieves what only the best and most original poetry can, which is to remake our understanding and sense of the genre.' – John Keene