The Star by My Head: Poets from Sweden - Paperback

by Malena Mörling (Editor), Malena Mörling (Translator), Jonas Ellerström (Editor)

Published in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, this breathtaking anthology features eight of Sweden's most highly regarded poets.

From Edith Södergran to Gunnar Ekelöf to Nobel Prize-winning Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden has long been home to a rich and luminous poetic tradition, notable for refreshing openness, striking honesty, and a rare transcendence that often springs from a keen attention to the natural world. In the poems of The Star by My Head, which begin in the early twentieth century and come up to the present day, pinecones cluster out of reach and lilacs attempt their tentative rebirth each year. A bee makes a face like a newborn's. A name etched in vapor on a windowpane, and its erasure, brings happiness.

With exquisite translations by internationally acclaimed poets and translators Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström offered alongside the Swedish originals, The Star by My Head is an essential bilingual volume and the premiere American anthology of its kind.

Author Biography

Ilya Kaminsky is the Director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation. A Russian born poet and translator, he is the author of Dancing in Odessa and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He lives in San Diego.

Malena Mörling is the author of two collections of poems, Astoria and Ocean Avenue. She has received a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. She is on the faculty of the Low-Residency MFA program at New England College, and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Jonas Ellerström is a Swedish author, translator, publisher, and critic, born in Southern Sweden, now living in Stockholm. He has published poetry and essay collections in Swedish and has translated many volumes of poetry, including the works of William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, and T.S. Eliot.