A Sudden Sky is a book of northern poems with crystalline images and lines, fragile graceful poems that speak of fragments, of the moment between open and closed eyes, of the human need for embrace. These poems note the spaces between things - always a gap, a failed connection, like radio waves caught in the sky.

I REFUSE to accept
the spine's dictated script
which at the precise moment
lets itself dissolve, lets itself be inserted
as a footnote of terror in the great law
that has condemned us to carry
the quake's loosening when the alibi doesn't hold
and the body surrenders itself
when dawn cleans up
among the stars

Gernes has called poetry "a resistance movement", explaining "A poem gives us the possibility of hearing our own voices. While the media offer us the world in small pieces, which are experienced as chaos, poetry seeks connections".

Ulrikka S. Gernes was born in 1965 in Sweden of Danish parents. At the age of twenty-two she moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, already a published and highly acclaimed poet. Her first collection, Natsværmer (Moth), was published in Denmark in 1984, when she was eighteen years old. Since then she has published an additional ten collections, all of them received gratefully in the Danish press. She is also the author of two books for children, as well as many short stories, songs, and various contributions to literary anthologies, art catalogues, magazines, newspapers and Danish National radio. In 2001 A Sudden Sky: Selected Poems, translated into English by Per Brask and Patrick Friesen, was published by Brick Books. Frayed Opus for String & Wind Instruments is the second translation of Ulrikka's work published by Brick Books (2015).

Ulrikka S. Gernes' profile page