Benhuset (The Bone House)

”Fall asleep and wake up. Wake up in another place. I have found the way here and maybe I have invented it. To the house, to the garden.

The movement and direction of each night, scattering without gathering. Carry baskets full of shards. Carry a mouth filled with water.

We gather around the table with the green cups. The garden is outside the window and beyond it nothing. Undreamt, as if the land had been devoured.”

A refuge on the outskirts. Porous passages and bodies. Forced transitions and shapeshiftings. The dead come here and the hidden, forgotten, dreamt. With their map-lessness, turning into shards, into abysses, and redrafted voices of otherness. Waiting. A narrator, looking for someone gone missing. The one who fell asleep, while she herself remained awake and was violated.

A collection of poems by Åsa Boström.
Illustrations by Sophie Lécuyer. Translation by Anna Viola Lovind.

Published on Hypnagoga Press in 2023.