House Inspections

“These poems do much more than blur the line between illusion and reality: they evoke that vibrant contradiction of dreaming in which the real and unreal exist in perfect simultaneity.”—The Georgia Review

Theatre

A man performs whole days from his life as a drama, each day at home in his apartment. He goes to great lengths to be as realistic as possible, walking around the apartment and tending to day-to-day business. Only at night, when he sits by himself in the kitchen, does he peek now and then at the window to glimpse his audience. He won’t completely abandon the notion that someone is out there. It’s like when you stand on the landing, in front of a closed door, and you can’t help thinking that someone is watching through the peephole.

With a dozen poems previously published in The Paris Review, Carsten René Nielsen is already a familiar name to US poetry readers. These dark prose poems—reminiscent of Charles Simic—map out a uniquely European territory with chilling, cinematic clarity.

Award-winning Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen is the author of nine books of poetry, including his US debut The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (2007). His poems appear in The Paris Review, Agni, Circumference, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Aarhus, Denmark.

David Keplinger‘s poetry awards include the Colorado Book Award, T.S. Eliot Prize, an NEA fellowship, and grants from the Danish Arts Council. He directs the MFA program at American University in Washington, DC.