“These poems are dark yet streaked with a strange light, precise and sober, that illuminates hopeless yet oddly consoling truths. Haugen’s vision leaves the reader no place to hide, cuts through its own gloom like a floodlight to find us defenseless, heartbroken, without illusions, but touched with a music, in Roger Greenwald’s seamless English, that manages “to leave some hesitant / marks of happiness.” —Stephen Kessler

“What has made Haugen’s voice carry across the generations since his debut in 1967 is his way of uniting formal variety with intimacy. At the same time as he tries out new ideas of form, he consistently challenges readers to participate in a struggle between passion and distance in which our humanity is at stake.” —Ulf Eriksson, Svenska Dagbladet

“Haugen’s poems inhabit the “charged stillness” at the heart of being. They are deeply and unsettlingly suggestive of an unfathomable proliferation we are part of but can’t access. “a system of measurement/ you do not know” and also of our compulsion to try to represent it. I am grateful for Roger Greenwald’s translations of this important poet.” —Karen Solie