Only the Gods are New

Johannes Anyuru

Release Date TBA | Publisher TBA | 90 pages

Translated from Swedish

With The Iliad as inspiration and intertext, Johannes Anyuru's 2003 debut is a flowing lyrical suite of poems depicting contemporary urban life in Sweden’s migrant suburbs. As if in a single, charged breath, the poem stretches from the first page to the last. It is strong, beautiful, urgent, painful, and glowing.

“It’s been a long time since I read such a stylistically self-assured debut. Anyuru is undoubtedly one of ‘the most powerful poets here / where the new meets itself / and the old must be scraped off, torn away so that time never has time to coagulate’”. — Dagens Nyheter (Sweden)

“This is a new, real poet, a poet who conjures a kingdom of heavy concrete, populated by young warriors with the radioactive black neon of the world buzzing in their ears, and who does so with a confidence in the poetic image, in power of metaphor to make the visible visible.” — Aftonbladet (Sweden)

Selected poems appear in: