Summer
Poetry
120 pages, paperback
Tarpaulin Sky Press
2022
…summer never ends
the currency has lost the language
inside language treacherous lilac
language syrener made for girls
like me for me the lilacs bloom
like little fingerprints hundreds
of bloody little finger prints I can’t hear
you I’m listening to the radio my wife
is feeding me pomegranate seeds
she’s feeding me with bloody fingers
it’s summer it’s summer I can’t
hear you det är sommar
“Johannes Göransson has written, in Summer, arguably the best lyrical poems of anger and grief… since Sylvia Plath tore up the runway”
— Cal Bedient, Lana Turner #16
“Reading Summer it’s hard to not think of and with the term intensity”
— Yongyu Chen, Cleveland Review
“Written into and through the death of his infant daughter from a rare lung condition, Göransson’s elegy/revenge fantasy (to paraphrase his description of the book) captivated me like few collections I’ve read in the past year…. ‘I call the poem Daughter,’ he writes, ‘then I call the hole in her lungs The World.’ The absence that becomes everything. There is no poem. There is no patch.”
— fck yr bookclub
“I burned through my first read of this book in an afternoon. It is a mesmerizing artwork, a nerve loaded with punishing sensitivity.”
— PJ Lombardo in Heavy Feather Review
“Summer is an embodied book, which means it is a book that is itself haunted.”
— Jared Joseph in Asymptote
“Göransson’s verse oscillates between English and Swedish. Language becomes infected, collapses, and resurrects into new forms.”
— Matt Lee in Ligeia Magazine
“Göransson’s poetic work is informed by multilingualism and translation, and often defies genre and the limitations of narrative in poetry. Summer, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press, is his most recent book of poems. It deals with the death of his daughter, Arachne, but also with debt, capitalism, the economic framework and “worth” of poetry, and many more interwoven topics.”
— Niina Pollari in The Millions