Full Description
'Sultry, raw and relentless. This intoxicating poetry seizes you with its beautiful, rich images and refuses to let go.' - Awater Poetry Prize jury
'This book is stunning. Totally wild.' - Jack Underwood
In Virgula, Sasja Janssen's award-winning collection, the comma becomes much more than a punctuation mark; it stops the stillness and allows thoughts and language to move forward. Virgula is invoked as a muse and a companion; she is called on in every poem, as if she were a goddess, friend or lover, someone who offers space when the emptiness becomes too heavy.
Virgula received the Awater Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize and the Herman de Coninck Prize and De Grote Poëzieprijs (Grand Poetry Prize) for best poetry collection 2021.
Contents
VIRGULA
the night I was impregnated
talk to me
there where he has a student sing
we go deeper
there is eternity in height
you leave me here with that dingy room
I love birch trees
I IMPLORE YOU
because the jackdaws are ignoring me
now I'm less able to handle the little things
as I drive a spade
because the chestnut tree in front of the prison
now I'm climbing out of the ditch
and I have risen from my first murder
because each day begins
now the little things are big
and I see them fly off again
VIRGULA
the morning is a wound
the metal under the mattress
I still need to teach the horse to swim
when the hours fall through the ceiling
my new husband has a dead wife
a drop falls into my glass of milk
there's no wind
