O

Swedish poet Judith Kiros's widely-acclaimed debut stretches boundaries of genre, race, and gender in an alternative production of Shakespeare's Othello that sidesteps black death for a multitude of futures. Taking a cue from Derek Walcott's Omeros, Kiros employs metric verve and critical bite to add to Shakespeare a wide range of historical and contemporary works, producing a meditation on blackness that sets up a new reflective surface at every turn. O marks the first translation into English of one of Sweden's most thrilling young poets. || "O is unlike anything you have ever read. A revisioning of a classic text and a revolt against its many implications. Judith Kiros's astonishing talents manifest in language that holds the balance between beautiful and heartbreaking." --MAAZA MENGISTE || "Riffing off Shakespeare's Othello and ranging across all manner of the poetic and critical, Judith Kiros's O, a book about race, gender, Blackness, Sweden, colonialism and decolonization, and so much more, achieves what only the best and most original poetry can, which is to remake our understanding and sense of the genre." --JOHN KEENE || "With a beguiling combination of technical assurance and a reckless -- in the best sense -- inclination to honor each poem's agency, we find in Kiros a poet equal to the chimerical nature of our times. This acerbic, endlessly surprising book is refreshing and moreish as a favored tipple over ice on a warm day." --KAYO CHINGONYI || "O is the conversation with form that I've been waiting for, where attention extends beyond the page and stage to demarcate the elasticity and permeability of empire. The terms at stake are clear. Clearly capitalism. Clearly freedom." --SARETTA MORGAN || "O refracts Shakespeare's Othello into five smartly staged movements that emerge contours of translation, canals, Blackness, 'unfamiliar women,' and light. Kiros whets language with serious play, offering a rumination that is liquid-measured and beautifully possessed." --ICA SADAGAT || Race Studies. Black Studies. Shakespeare Studies. Performance Studies. Swedish Literature. Poetry. Translation