White Pine Press acquires Kim Simonsen’s 2023 poetry collection
White Pine Press: White Pine Press, headquartered in Buffalo, New York, has acquired worldwide English language rights to Kim Simonsen’s 2023 poetry collection, Lívfrøðiliga samansetingin í einum dropa av havvatni minnir um blóðið í mínum æðrum (Eng. The biological composition of a drop of seawater is reminiscent of the blood in my veins), as translated from Faroese by award-winning American poet Randi Ward. Publication is tentatively scheduled for late 2026.
Simonsen’s collection was originally published by Forlagið Verksmiðjan and later nominated for the 2024 Nordic Council Literature Prize. The nominating committee praised the book, written shortly after the death of the poet’s father, as an intense ecopoetic work that creates a language about grief and father / son relationships which transcends familial or personal sorrow. “A complex temporal understanding runs through the poems, consistently oscillating between the linear and the cyclical, between life and death, blood and the sea, between biology and philosophy.”
Dennis Maloney, founding editor and publisher of White Pine Press, has championed literature in translation for 52 years. He has published contemporary literature from over 35 languages and is also known for supporting both established and emerging American writers.
White Pine Press’s distinguished list of authors includes, among others, Nobel Prize laureates William Golding, Pablo Neruda, Tomas Tranströmer, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Gabriela Mistral as well as winners of the American Book Award, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nordic Council Literature Prize.
“White Pine Press is particularly interested in publishing languages that are underrepresented in English translation. We’ve recently published contemporary work from Sami, Bulgarian, Occitan, and Slovenian,” Mr. Maloney said. “With Simonsen’s recent collection, we are excited to add Faroese to our list. In his sparse verse, Simonsen embraces both the human and natural worlds in a unique way, rendered in these excellent translations by Randi Ward.”
English translations of poems from Simonsen’s 2023 collection have appeared in Columbia Journal, Notre Dame Review, and on Four Way Books’s The Translator’s Page in recent months. Lívfrøðiliga samansetingin í einum dropa av havvatni minnir um blóðið í mínum æðrum is also slated for publication in Denmark (Forlaget Virkelig, 2025) and North Macedonia (PNV, 2026). Hungarian and Italian translations of the collection were released this spring—by Ø / Észak and I libri di Mompracem respectively— and the book has been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, German, and Russian.
