Bücher von Kristiina Ehin

On the Edge of a Sword is a selection of Kristiina Ehin's latest work - deeply personal, unflinchingly honest, autobiographical poems which, at the same time, are also a heartfelt defense of the right of the Estonian language to exist and flourish in our increasingly anglicised world.

A woman cultivates a knack for walking on water, but is undermined by her husband's brain, which he removes each night when he returns home from work; a couple overcomes the irksome mischief of the gods; a skeptical dragon wonders what sex is all about: this is the world of Kristiina Ehin.From the 2007 British Poetry Society Popescu prize winner for European poetry in translation: a series of comic, surreal adventures.Kristiina Ehin's quirky voice takes each story directly from the dream state, at times stubborn and resistant, at other times masochistically compliant. Ehin offers up modern folktales in which the very nature of our human identity is at stake-rampant with images and archetypes both new and old, and mediated by the abrupt changes we can only experience in dreams.KRISTIINA EHIN is a highly acclaimed performer of her poetry, prose and drama in Estonian as well as English. This is her first book of stories to be published in the U.S. In her native Estonia, she has published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories and a retelling of South-Estonian folk tales. She has written plays, as well as poetic radio broadcasts. She has won Estonia's most prestigious poetry prize for Kaitseala-a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent living as a nature reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia's north coast. In the UK, she has published six translated books of poetry and three of prose.

Rooted in an ancient folk song tradition, Ehin's poetry is both universal and deeply personal; her language is direct and simple, yet she expresses herself so vividly that her joys and sorrows become the reader's own. These poems, selected from her most recent collection, were written over 2 years, beginning shortly before the birth of her son.