Freke Räihä

Freke Räihä, based in the rural Degeberga, in the far south of Sweden, but born in Stockholm in 1978, is a reader and writer of poetry who debuted in 2001 and has published 14 books in total. Two of them are available in English. A minor part of her work can be found in online publications and print magazines. Räihä’s writing has been called “eclectic” and “innovative” and the 2016 book «Baggböleri» was crowned the angriest book of poetry from that year and was nominated as book of the year by Norrlands litteratursällskap. He has just released the long poems “Illegalen” and “Hem för vård och boende” (Smockadoll, 2017). Poetry has earned Räihä five scholarships over the past five years. Räihä also has degrees in Creative Writing, Radical Pedagogy and Publishing Studies. Besides poetry, Räihä cheats as an essay writer, translator, journalist and critic. He also makes graphic form and “sings” in a document art crust orchestra based in Malmö – “A4”. Webpage (bilingual): http://frekeraiha.se

copyright Ida Räihä

Poems from the novel Nomos (2012)

 
 
For Anna, as I remember you kissing while exhaling.

NOTE: Metaphor, or just text, also merging, the receptions, means that two or more patches of material bind together to form a larger paragraph. The connection (interval — the waiting rooms, the granting and the placing of the corridors — and the contiguity) between the set patches is called suture and the interval can be filled with some kind of mass, like language, plaster or habit. Standards or intervals, that does not affix to the patches in any way, do not count as poetry. Sewing is a kind of poetry, [like] the self-medicating the own and the owning properties of medicine. A suture can grant different movements – diagnosis – between the paragraphs. Objects can be plastic, steel, intravenous paper, punctuation and so forth. The merging is done with some sort of dressing technique, poethic; [like] the water closets, white houses and homes with a vertical score along the middle – for example sizing while unction, different welds, nails and ichnographies. The vertical distance between paragraphs in a text is called a vault. When its name, for example through post processing, is no longer visible in its completed form, it is called a seam.

p. 75;

ASPGATAN 10. It was green: the rooms, the tarpaulin on the roof, the grass — the kitchen table ran straight through, the bathroom boiled, filtered; the narcotics division put the house under surveillance. Sometimes I could not even get my pants off before. Spaghetti and only spaghetti. It was a gathered freedom, lasting as day old milk. Like the summer month. I had time to form a routine: the libraries and the consumption of Chinese poetry, American films and Statesman whisky. The currants rotted from the branches. The neighbours were stereotypes, we were in heat and we all shared ours. We shared everyone; I fell asleep on the floor, we captured spiders, you were allergic to the fluff and the Waffle himself coined “I want a woman or a midnight binge”. It was the happiest day of my life.

p. 96;

From: A dialectic [as longing]

LETTER. Do not write any more, mute, menstruum, writes more tomorrow; have goods, be there in twenty. I cannot reach you. From a penthouse on Drury Lane: that which became and that which did not and that which is longing and mulch; freckles and shaved and swallows and swallows. Olives with pimento — the punishment — the silence — like the dead Chinese. “The idea of drinking does not leave as long as the thirst lasts.” The icons. “Walnut / walnut / husk nut / head scuffs / the scalp from within.” The arms around the receiver, “as if I were a dog”. Like barefoot; naked on the bridge you moved around around, like unjustly gathered and collected and under one title placed.

To mine always.