24/11/2021
📣 We are terribly excited to announce our first title of 2022, and to simultaneously reveal the cover! 📣
Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus by Signe Gjessing, translated from the Danish by Denise Newman, is an exquisite, lyrical reimagining of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work of 1922, from a rising star on par with Inger Christensen.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, often noted as the most important philosophical work of the 20th century, had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science.
Following on from Wittgenstein 100 years later, Signe Gjessing updates and reimagines the Tractatus, marrying poetry with philosophy to test the boundaries of reality. Stunning, knowing, and revitalising, and glinting with stars, silk, and ecstasy, this is poetry which exacts the logical consequence of philosophy, while locating beauty and significance in the ‘nonsense’ of the world which Wittgenstein dismissed.
Publishing 15 April and designed by Studio Ard, this is the first time Lolli is publishing a work of poetry.
“Signe Gjessing is Wittgenstein plus rapture. In her reimagining of the Tractatus, poetry is a verb; an action to be found in transgressions and transitions. Like a silken butterfly emerging from its cocoon.”
– Information
“Gjessing is not a political poet in the traditional sense, and it is easy to be dazzled by the uplifting beauty of her poems. But it is also possible to read a more abstract political dimension into her Tractacus and regard it as a poetic ontology – as politics on a larger, more cosmic level. This is poetry about how we organise the spaces we enter.”
– ATLAS
Signe Gjessing (b. 1992) is a Danish poet. She has published several collections of poetry and a novella, and is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Bodil & Jørgen Munch Christensen Prize for emerging writers.
Denise Newman is an award-winning poet and translator. Her translation of Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt won the 2015 PEN Translation Award. Her own writing has appeared widely and she teaches at the California College of the Arts.
