There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die

By the acclaimed author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, a startling and darkly funny volume of selected poetry, the first to be translated into English.

It was a meaningless day
like what you call
love

It was a Thursday
In parentheses. The brackets around it
Have already faded
Life tastes of ash
And is bearable.

From one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, the author of the acclaimed Copenhagen Trilogy, comes There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, a major volume of selected poetry written throughout Tove Ditlevsen’s life. Infused with the same wry nihilism, quiet intensity, dark humor, and crystalline genius that readers savor in her prose, these are heartbreak poems, childhood poems, self-portraits, death poems, wounded poems, confessional poems, and love poems—poems that stare into the surfaces that seduce and deceive us. They describe childhood, longing, loss, and memory, obsessively tracing their imprints and intrusions upon everyday life. With morbid curiosity, Ditlevsen’s poems turn toward the uncanny and the abject, approaching gingerly. They stitch the gray scale of daily disappointment with vivid, unsparing detail, a degree of precision that renders loneliness psychedelic.

Speaking across generations to both the passions of youth and the agonies of adulthood, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die reveals everyday life stripped of its excesses, exposing its bones and bare qualities: the normal and the strange, the meaningful and the meaningless. These startling, resonant poems are both canonical and contemporary, and demand to be shared with friends, loved ones, nemeses, and strangers alike.