Books
To the Most Beautiful
To the Most Beautiful. 117 poems. Translated to English by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Coimpress, 2024)
Til den smukkeste. 117 digte (Gyldendal, 2019)
Til den skjønneste. 117 dikt. Translated to Norwegian by Eira Søyseth (Cappelen Damm, 2020)
Till den vackraste. 117 dikter. Translated to Swedish by Jonas Rasmussen (Pequod Press, 2021)
To the Most Beautiful. 117 poems
Poetry
Gyldendal, 2019 / Coimpress, 2024
Cover: Marie Brodersen / Hanna Bergman
Translated to Norwegian, Swedish and English
Reading (in Danish) → listen here
Read more about the English translation → here
A ritualistic, systemic and myth-critical poetry collection in nine parts, one for each of the nine muses. About apples and bees, remembering and forgetting, delight and horror, war and the question: What is beautiful for whom, and why?
Moestrup has done it again – woven together the sensational and the succinct, myth and everyday life, high and low, rhythm and image, musicality and visuality, politics and aesthetics, language and body, pop and poetry, the ordinary and the exalted, intellectualism and sensuality – only this time with the dimension of planetary awareness that no sentient being on this planet can eschew in times of climate crisis.
♥♥♥♥♥ Politiken
Mette Moestrup’s writing is so playful and rich, that every experience with it is one of adoring abandonment, of mind and body attempting to out-spin each other.
Weekendavisen
The hard-hitting feminist, power-, myth- and language-critical perspective that is always present in Moestrup’s work is thankfully not absent from this new collection either.
★★★★★ Kristeligt Dagblad
To the Most Beautiful [is] a poetry collection with scintillating moments of linguistic astuteness and beauty.”
★★★★★ Berlingske Tidende
A firework display of a poetry collection.
★★★★★ Jyllands Posten
It’s hard to single out another Danish poet today who writes with such precision, as well as such rhythmic and melodic ease, as Mette Moestrup does.
Information
What fireworks! Mette Moestrup is a poetic genius.
Sydsvenskan
The Danish poet Mette Moestrup twists and turns language and the female ideal. Her new collection of poems To the Most Beautiful is an apple of discord thrown into Western civilisation.
Göteborgs-Posten
Take a bite of the fruit. Lick up the juice. Stick your fingers in. Read this poetry collection.
Örnen och Kråkan
Swan-egged, paradise-appled, at once ant-high and cosmic, Mette Moestrup’s To the Most Beautiful seats the reader in a clearing for the late-afternoon picnic of our existence as a species. Dame Science has just ripped away her mask to show her goddess-face. Which way will fortune tip? What intimacies, what violences might the lyric deliver like a viscous drip? In limber, pointed translation by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, this fetching, fatal work belongs beside those of Olga Ravn, Sara Stridsberg, Anne Carson and Sappho herself—weird sisters whose sweetbitter arrows hit the mark, every time.
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
Omina
Omina. Poems. With Naja Marie Aidt (2016)
Omina. Poems. Translated to Swedish by Jonas Rasmussen (Ellerströms, 2019)
Omina
Poems
Gyldendal, 2016
Cover: Anni’s
Translated to Swedish
Audiobook (Danish) → listen here
A poem in two voices about the Amazon warriors and obscure omens.
These two poets – Mette Moestrup and Naja Marie Aidt – lift the poems with ultimate precision.
★★★★★ Nordjyske Stiftstidende
Omina requires re-reading, but then it wins you over with its existential weight.
★★★★★ Kristeligt Dagblad
Such a stunningly beautiful description of an impossibility.
Göteborgs-Posten
Naja Marie Aidt and Mette Moestrup’s powerful battle chant for Amazons.
Sydsvenskan
Free Weaving
Frit flet / Free Weaving with Naja Marie Aidt and Line Knutzon (2014)
Frit flet / Free Weaving with Naja Marie Aidt and Line Knutzon (2014)
Frit flet. Fællesbogen / Free Weaving. The Collective Book
Collective work
Gyldendal, 2014
Cover: Kim Lykke
The collective book Frit flet / Free Weaving had a literary award named after it. The award was established in 2015 by the Politiken Foundation. The book was also staged to great acclaim as a theatre production at SORT/HVID )‘BLACK/WHITE) by director Liv Helm, set designer Franciska Zahle and music producer Hannah Schneider. See → here
Free Weaving is an extensive, collective, radically-inclusive hybrid work about money, love, violence, gender, skin, class, desire, laughter, age, place and freedom.
It’s a rich, generous, important and utterly sumptuous book
♥♥♥♥♥ Politiken
Naja Marie Aidt, Line Knutzon and Mette Moestrup’s collectively latticework is an important and sensuous book.
★★★★★ Jyllands-Posten
This A, B and C trio comes across as a barefaced, noisy punk band. The group's collective voice is riled up. It permits itself to relay its messages impulsively and shamelessly, sometimes laughingly, other times angrily. ‘FUCK THE OLD WORLD’, as one of the group writes under the picture of a blonde young Line Knutzon.
Vagant – read ‘A solidary roar of laughter’ (Danish) → here
Die, Lie, die
Dø, løgn, dø / Die, Lie, die. Poems (Gyldendal, 2012)
Dø, løgn, dø / Die, Lie, die. Poems (Gyldendal, 2012)
Dö, lögn, dö. Poems. Translated to Swedish by Jonas Rasmussen and Clement Altgård (Pequod Press, 2013)
Stirb, Lüge, stirb. Poems. Translated to German by Alexander Sitzmann (kookbooks, 2017)
Die, Lie, die
Poems
Gyldendal, 2012
Cover: Anni’s
Translated to Swedish and German
Audiobook (Danish) → listen here
Reading (Danish) → listen here
Existential and experimental poetry collection in five parts. About myth, community and loss of love.
Mette Moestrup is a poet who has managed to break through all poetic walls of sound. In Die, Lie, die – her first poetry collection after 2006’s kingsize – she shows with her multiple themes and full range of expressivity how rich the register she has to play on is.
★★★★★ Berlingske
Mette Moestrup shuffles the cards in her new book, Die, Lie, die, and is well on her way to making her mark on a third, future poetic form: the performative.
★★★★★ Jyllandsposten
Hopefully I’ve made it clear that I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about any poetry than I am about Moestrup’s Di, Lie, die. In her work with the material of language, Moestrup manages to combine the highest sensuality with the highest intellectuality, thigh-slapping vulgarity with subtle reflection, nonsense with song, and it is wonderfully stimulating for the senses, cerebral matter, laughter muscles and tear ducts.
KRITIK
Blood-red threads of community, gender, (dis)power, death and desire run through Mette Moestrup’s powerful poetic flow.
Morgenbladet
The show-inspired strategies demonstrated in Moestrup’s poems seem to take the step into regular witchcraft rituals, and one could argue that nature seems less plasticky this time and more subterranean, Khtonian: dark, threatening and out of control, even as the masquerade is still present. Because she quickly pierces the gloomy tone, it’s as if the magic from the trick mask cracks and a ‘smaller’ voice emerges. The many silly rhymes give the poems – no matter how angry – a heightened, skewed and humorous touch […] Moestrup’s musings are hilarious, beautiful, wild and relevant.”
Klassekampen
In the end, the female voices triumph over the computer. In the end, they laugh together. It’s an unusually happy, formally austere and almost brutally utopian ending to a book that otherwise explodes from its pages.
Information
A both important and qualitatively outstanding publication.
Fixpoetry
Levelled to the Ground
Jævnet med jorden / Levelled to the Ground. Novel (Gyldendal, 2009)
Levelled to the Ground
Novel
Gyldendal, 2009
Cover: CYF
Novel collage about water, maternal inheritance and ghosts. In defence of the falling woman.
I have long been a fan of Mette Moestrup’s bold and intelligent poems, but with her new and first novel, Levelled to the Ground, she continues in a more honest and sensitive direction. An old water mill that has been in the female protagonist’s family for generations is razed to the ground, and a violent love affair is about to meet the same end. In a boat scene, eels are speared with grandma and grandma’s twin, a kind of initiation ritual to the ranks of women. It is unforgettable, as are the more essayistic parts of the book. The daughter, granddaughter, lover, grown woman and author Mette Moestrup are written together into one big mass, and it is raw and moving. In a staggering feat, Moestrup manages to make violent emotions and intellectual reflections two sides of the same coin. And the question is whether it hasn’t always been this way. By far one of the best books of the year.
★★★★★★ (Olga Ravn) Femina
Moestrup’s book hits right in the diaphragm. It resembles an existential recognition that I happen to find myself in too. To recognise the attachment to body and gender and land and family and places you might have preferred to exile yourself from. To recognise your mythical mothers and not just seek the symbolic fathers. To risk falling – not in identification with Baudelaire’s falling man (one of modernity’s emblems of divided consciousness) – but with the fallen (sexually desirous) woman and even the white lady. Finding not only your own space, but also your own fall.
Information
A highly-recommended cynical love story with eerie juices.
Berlingske Tidende
In Moestrup's book, her love affair with Morten goes awry, and the final text – with green text against a black background – is an almost choreographic recipe for the woman’s actual fall to the snow-covered ground at nighttime. A text that can be read as preparatory exercises for the invisibility and social annihilation that the liberated woman may well encounter.
Bergens Tidende
kingsize
kingsize. Poetry (Gyldendal, 2006)
kingsize. Poetry. Translated to English by Mark Kline (Subpress, 2014)
kingsize
Poetry
Gyldendal, 2006
Translated to English
Partially translated to Norwegian 9 dikt om begjær / 9 poems on desire (Flamme Forlag, 2009)
Politics and love are intertwined in this poetry collection with hybrid and performative elements.
Mette Moestrup triumferer med veloplagt vilde muterende digte om køn og etnicitet.
Information
If I kissed Cleopatra’s eyes and her mouth, I would have been poisoned on the spot, but it would be worth the nausea and pain. It’s much the same with Mette Moestrup’s new poems; I am dizzy and dazzled, excited and muddled. […] Full of mercury and copper sulphate, these hermaphroditic poems are the size of life.
Politiken
Once again, Moestrup stands out as our sharpest (post-)feminist poet, but compared to Golden Delicious, her attitude has become both more raw and more political – the poisonous, glittery nail polish has also made space for several fresh attacks on Danish immigration policy […] Poetic impurity is at its finest in Mette Moestrup. Friends, she writes the arses out of the breeches of all dressage riders. Her anger has style. Her verses are like delicious weapons.
Weekendavisen
This is political poetry at the highest level and has not been done better in Danish since the two stars of this genre – Ivan Malinowski and Erik Knudsen – were on the scene decades ago.
Kristeligt Dagblad
Mette Moestrup’s new poems drag the reader behind them like a cavewoman her slayed prey. Mette Moestrup has found a poetic format that gives her talent an astonishing scope.
KRITIK
No American poet sounds exactly like that, but one could; I wish one did.
The Yale Review
Golden Delicious
Golden Delicious. Poetry (Gyldendal, 2002)
Golden Delicious. Poetry. Translated to Swedish by Marie Silkeberg (Gyldendal, 2002)
Golden Delicious
Poetry
Gyldendal, 2002
Translated to Swedish
Poetry collection in three parts. About apples, gender, (bi)sexuality and muses.
A theatrical play with gender, its splitting, doubling and mischievous masking, and an attempt with identity: its temporariness and mutability. Mette Moestrup’s poems may appear cheerful and light, but they are not easy to decode. The game is dead serious and the simplicity is only surface-level.
Information
Moestrup is a DJ poet. She mixes snippets of great (and small) world literature with the lines she hears from children, TV and other amusing places […] Moestrup is in the house, and the dick poem, which consists of samples from Thomsen, Frank and Nordbrandt [famous Danish male poets, red.] is called ‘Rose’ and is a true hit.
Ekstra Bladet
A whole little idiosyncratic galaxy – maybe more like apple basket – of wild humour, porous fragility and shrill strength, girlish fun and games, death and gender and sexuality. Incredible batman apples, pure Golden Delicious in the infinite loneliness of this work
Politiken
The respect-inspiring, richly toned and gesturing poetry collection Golden Delicious […] Moestrup insists on writing both, poetry and female poetry, because there is no contradiction, and she writes it on full throttle and with full confusion and merciless sobriety and blatant literariness. Not to mention a wicked sense of humour.
Weekendavisen
Autobiographical experience enters the canon. She boldly lets it be imbued with the politically explosive power of the private.
Aftonbladet
Tatooes
Tatoveringer / Tatoos. Poems (Gyldendal, 1998)
Tatoos
Poetry
Gyldendal, 1998
Rhythmic debut poetry collection about childhood, nature and sensation.
These strange poems emanate their own prickly and saturated fascination that is difficult to pin down, but easy to be persuaded by. […] All over there is this raw, earthy odour of childhood […], a flighty symbolic gallery of figures that are either in opposition to or intimate symbiosis with a close-felt organic swarm.
Weekendavisen
What Does Ulla the Snowy Owl Say?
What Does Ulla the Snowy Owl Say? Children’s book. Illustrations by Charlotte Pardi (Gyldendal, 2009)
The Chinese translation
What Does Ulla the Snowy Owl Say?
Children’s book.
Gyldendal, 2009
Children’s book for pre-schoolers about a baby snowy owl who learns to say hoo-hoo.
What Does Ulla the Snowy Owl Say? is a delightful little story about Ulla the baby snowy owl who can’t speak properly. She tries all the vowels in the alphabet, but it doesn't help much – she still isn’t speaking the way baby snowy owls are supposed speak. However, Ulla is very good at flying. She spreads her wings and looks at the animals below in the snow – a snow hare, a snow fox and a polar bear. But she can’t talk to them, because Ulla doesn’t know how to get her words out, which offends the other animals. The story is a picture book for preschoolers. Younger children will enjoy the many repetitions and relate to the joy of being back home with mummy owl, while older children will laugh at Ulla’s many attempts to find the perfect snowy owl sound.
♥♥♥♥♥Politiken
Ten Green Fingers
Ten Green Fingers. Children’s book. Illustrations by Lilian Brøgger (Gyldendal, 200)
Ten Green Fingers
Children’s book
Gyldendal, 2007
Children's book for 5-8 year olds about the day Roland wakes up with green fingers – a story about being a child of divorce, with green drops of magical realism mixed in.
“The language is so gossamer that the deeper meaning of the story packs a punch. Each line lies beautifully in the mouth. Everything is cut-down and altered to fit. This is creative linguistic confusion at its best, coupled with equal parts fun and vulnerability.”
★★★★★★ Berlingske Tidende
“A new children’s classic […] true and everlasting story.”
★★★★★★ Ekstrabladet
Rilke & Rhythm
Rilke & rytme / Rilke & Rhythm. Literary criticism and essays (Herman & Frudit, 2023)
Rilke & Rhythm
Literary criticism and essays
Herman & Frudit, 2023
(reissue, first published in 1999)
Numbered and signed
An exploration of the lyrical rhythm of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) and an analytical and methodical examination of the relationship between prosody and rhythm.