Cold Moons

(Paperback)

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Magns Sigurdsson spare poems pay rare attention to the minute revelations of nature rather than allowing the crudeness of machinery to bulldoze our sentiments. Through intricate wordplay and a titanic understanding of his native Icelandic, rendered with perfect tone by awardwinning translator Meg Matich, Sigurdsson creates tiny but arresting artifactsfragments that scale an instant to an aeon, and a thousand millennia to a second. Whether describing the dwarf wasp's onemillimeter wingspan or the roots of a bonsai, he is a cosmologist of language, and Cold Moons is an intimate map of his distinctive universe.

Author Bio

Magnus Sigurdsson (b. 1984) is an Icelandic poet and translator. His debut was a translation of Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos into Icelandic, published by the University of Iceland Press (2007). The translation was awarded the Student Service Scholarship and the Landsbanki Bank Stipend. Sigurdsson's first book of poems, Fidrildi, mynta og sporfuglar Lesbiu (2008), received the Tomas Gudmundsson Poetry Prize. In 2013, Sigurdsson received the prestigious Jon ur Vor Poetry Prize for the poem, "Tunglsljos," which later appeared in Sigurdsson's third book, Timi kaldra mana (2013). Sigurdsson's translations include a collection of poems by the Norwegian Tor Ulven, Steingerd vaengjapor (2012), and a Spanish translation from the Icelandic, together with Laia Arguelles Folch, of Ingibjorg Haraldsdottir's seminal book of poems, La cabeza de la mujer (2011). Forthcoming is Sigurdsson's selection of poems by Adelaide Crapsey, the unheralded pioneer of modern verse in America. Most recently, Sigurdsson released a fourth book of poems, Krummafotur. He lives in Reykjavik, Iceland. Meg Matich is a poet and translator, and a recent recipient of the PEN/Heim Translation grant. Her translations have appeared in Exchanges, Words Without Borders, Absinthe, and other journals. She was a finalist for the 2015 ALTA fellowship and has received grants and fellowships from Columbia University, the DAAD, and the Banff Centre. She has participated in Festival Neue Literatur, presented work on Icelandic at Barnard's Translation in Transition conference, assisted with Columbia University's Word for Word program, and worked in workshops at the Goethe-Institut/German Book Office. While in residence at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in 2014, Matich translated the work of Icelandic poet Magnus Sigurdsson. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.