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Astrid Alben is a poet, editor and translator. Her debut collection Ai! Ai! Pianissimo was published by Arc in 2011. She is a Rijksakademie Amsterdam Fellow and was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in 2014. Her poems, essays, translations and reviews have been widely published, including in the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Oxford Poetry, The Rialto and The Poetry Review. Her poetry is translated into Romanian, Dutch, Slovenian, Maltese and Chinese. She is currently Director of the Poetry Translation Centre.Plainspeak is the highly anticipated second collection by Astrid Alben, following her acclaimed debut Ai! Ai! Pianissimo. In these startling poems, readers will experience Alben’s unorthodox alter-ego-thinking-out-louder approach with the same exhilaration as they might engage with art or jazz. The poems in Plainspeak deal with place, ancestral ties, solitude, flight, insomnia and the embattled absurdities of daily life.
Alben plays with formal boundaries, linguistic identity and the lyrical poetic voice, writing with rhythmic vitality and visual imagination. The poems tell multiple narratives whilst retaining the freedom of abstraction; they are supple and precise, each one an installation evoking different aspects of a particular theme.
Plainspeak reinvents play and logic, is poignant and humorous, absurd and anguished: a book for and of the times we live in.
‘Astrid Alben’s poems occupy a text-transcending space that is part dance, part art installation, and part astrophysics. An heir to European experimentalism as much as to John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Plainspeak is a multi-vocal poetry: unpredictable, elegant and wholly original.’ – Kathryn Maris