Fluidly ranging across the times and spaces of northern Scandinavia, this majestic, elegiac prose-poem will leave you haunted by its natural beauty and generational trauma. This is an epic of loss - of indigenous language, land, loved ones - caused by Swedish industrial expansion northward. A polyphonic array of voices from two Sami families, across the span of a century, will lodge their fragments of landscape and poetry deep within you.
Wild rivers
rushing untouched
in their deep grooves
And strong men
were sent up through
the forests
-
They were to tame
the river and yoke
the power of the rapids
-
Even though our kinsmen
had long moved with their herds across
this rolling river valley
...
But the Swede he dammed
And the river was left
muffled and silent
behind the dams' dim
stony blind walls
