From Jönköpings Posten, by Björn Kohlström:
Aase Berg is not only one of Sweden’s most readable poets, but also one of the most important. Since her first book, Hos Rådjur (1997) she has written hard, compressed poetry, full of alliteration and neologisms, in which she deforms the world with a eerie precision. Her compact books scrutinize the common phenomena of the contemporary.
In her new poetry collection, Hackers, she takes feminism one step further, and introduces us to “the Hag,” a more unruly version of the conciliatory cultural figure. Here it’s a matter of self-defense, not to mention threat. I read the book as the overture to her novel, which will be published next year, in which she will develop this theme. Hurry up and get acquainted with her work, because this is something that eveyone will be talking about.
From Dagens Nyheter, by Viola Bao:
The hacker and the parasite are the center of Hackers. The first few lines take on an extreme, offensive tone characteristic of Berg: “We are a threat: We are the woman trap. We are the hostess animal, connected to slopp-fleshed parasites such as lazy men and manipulative fuck-obsessives.”
Already here, the book forms an image that runs throughout the book: the female body as a host for male parasites; a porous landscape vulnerable to trojans, hackers and other foreign intruders.
The invasion motif returns in line after line. In one passage, Berg describes Tahitian saltwater pearls, whose core is formed not from a grain of sand but from a parasite. Berg names a number of biological parasites: toxoplasma gondii, kleptoparasites, trematodes. There are also the Internet hackers, Anonymous, Private Manning.
From Göteborgs-posten, by Lisa Ahlqvist:
In varying verse forms and with inspiration from figures like Valerie Solanas, Sara Stridsberg and Helen von Druskowitz, Hackers is over a hundred pages long… In her not always easily consumed authorship, Aase Berg unites a great intelligence with beautiful poetic fury.
From Ystads Allehanda, by Elisabeth Hjorth:
Hackers is an attack. An act of aggression against the patriarchy, heavy fire against society’s male body. Problematically it is also about sleeping with the enemy. This starting point collides with the image of the threatening hag who hacks into the system with the goal of destroying it. In one explanatory note, Berg writes about the women that “we have always been good at a very complicated love.”
From Swedish Television, report by Oscar Anesten:
Berg: “How do you fuck up a system from within? I started thinking in terms of Trojan horses, I started thinking about Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (stalkers in other words), parasites, and source codes that destroy systems from within in a clever way, that ousmarts.”