Marjun Syderbø Kjelnæs

The Karma Goat

Karmageitin

Ungu Føroyar 2022

138 pages

ISBN: 978-99918-889-4-1

The Girl’s Room

Gentukamarið

Ungu Føroyar 2022

96 pages

ISBN: 978-99918-889-5-8

The Karma Goat and The Girl’s Room is a literary double work, each with its own expression and character. There are two different genres: The Karma Goat is a collection of poems and The Girl’s Room is a dramatic text, that has already been performed on stage. The works can be read in any order, and are not linearly or causally linked, but form rather two interlocking works, in which the dialogues of the drama, the movements of the poems, the states of mind and the physical spaces grow into each other.

As the title of the dramatic text The Girl’s Room indicates, it features a female protagonist. The same is true in The Karma Goat, in which we follow the poet-self as an adult, middle-aged woman. The poems are set in the woman’s home, but emerge and grow from the girl’s childhood room. It is from here that the poet’s sense of the world springs, and here that it links itself to the family. The room has been passed down from the aunt to the poet’s ‘I’. The poems leave the girl’s room, but they always return, in cycles small and large. There is a remarkable insistence in the movement of the poems; there is a longing and a desire to become part of the world, but in each poem the desire to connect with, understand and become part of the world is turned on its head and returns home – home to the girl’s childhood room or to the kitchen of the mid-life crisis; not necessarily out of actual homesickness, but as a necessity. As soon as the poem has returned home, the poet ‘I’ disappears and exhaustion sets in, and out of this grows a new longing.