New in USA

Rannvá Holm Mortensen is a visual artist who debuted as a poet with the poetry collection Sólsmakkur in 2018. In this collection the two art forms poetry and visual arts are combined in a beautiful book with a very moving text. The poetry collection is now being published in the United States in English translation by Matthew Landrum. The English title is Suntaste and it is published by IPI Press.

Rannvá works in the colors of the Faroe Islands: reds, grays, black, white, and sometimes terra cotta, flesh. Her prints, collages, woodcuts and handwritten poems—dreamscapes and nightmares—are illuminated in this reproduction of her original artists book. Nature, earth mother, lifeblood of sea creatures, saltwater in our arteries, dendrites and seaweed-shaped shape-shifters. As you read, the female body dissolves into nature. One feels porous and pulsating. There is a cry, a plea at the core of the work—tidal longing. One fish, one child, one woman at a time. It’s a woman’s world, bloody, ventricular.