blush / river / fox

Anna Nygren is an autistic, queer, and neuroqueer writer, artist, and translator. They are the author of several previous Swedish-language works, including their play-experimental translation of Hannah Emerson’s chapbook You Are Helping This Great Universe Explode. As an artist, they work primarily with textiles and are currently at work on a piece about fish, neurodivergence, hospitals, and ideas of what a Good Life is. Nygren lives in Gothenburg, Sweden, with their cat, Zlatan.

“In their first English-language publication, Swedish artist and writer Nygren pushes and pulls language forms, creating a tripartite poetry collection that is visceral, playful, urgent, and fragmented.”—Becca Brody, Library Journal“​Rough and tender at the edges, versatile and keen at heart, blush / river / fox contains a word-world that is utterly unique and captivating.”—West Trade Review"Brutal, honest, out-of-this-world, a form of maximalist-minimalism, I would compare Anna Nygren's writing to Kathy Acker, but no, it goes deeper than Acker, into its own unique territory and genre. Genreless works are almost always the best, the ones that you don't quite know which bookshelf to put them on, uncategorizable, they need their own bookshelf altogether. This is one of the finest examples of one of these works."—Alvina Chamberland, author of Love the World or Get Killed Trying"In Anna Nygren’s extraordinarily profound and beautifully tender American debut, the presence of the Swedish language hovers remarkably just below the English language as if each were a kind of transparency. Nygren’s writing is virtuosic and transformative and holds within it an internal depth I have never before known."—Malena Mörling, editor and translator of The Star by My Head"Reading Anna Nygren’s astonishing blush / river / fox, I found myself returning to Bataille’s sentence, 'The animal is in the world like water in water.' The integration of these animals into the world of the book is achieved through the discursive gestures of repetition and spelling, through surprise and orthographic wildness. But for these animals, in this world, integration brings hard edges: even the light is hard, pricks us. That there is pain, that waters are not always so confluent, is part of its tempo. In just the way our animal bodies, sticky with pink gloss and blood, die, dissolve and thereby shine ('Everyone else shines so strangely'), this book’s study of loneliness refines our togetherness, that magic we make when we accompany one another. blush / river / fox is at once furious, tender, open, and unstoppable. I love it."—Brandon Brown, author of The Four Seasons