Reviews of The Scent of Light
This notice comes from the Biden & Tanner in Basel, Switzerland, describing the book The Scent of Light and the writing of Kristjana Gunnars.
Gunnars’ work is as though designed for handselling: These novellas, previously published only in Canada, were the underground books of their time, smuggled over borders, beloved by booksellers-indeed, they were the tomes booksellers didn't want to pass on to just any random customer: can a bookseller just keep a book for themselves? We hope you don’t tell. [This is] Autofiction before such a term existed: These works by writer, poet and painter Kristjana Gunnars presaged the work of writers like Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, and Sheila Heti. For readers of Duras' The Lover, Michael Ontaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, anything by Roland Barthes, and Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal. Kazim Ali wrote the introduction. [to this omnibus collection]. There’s a pleasant 80s/90s vibe to these books, like the film An Unbearable Lightness of Being or long letters sent by mail, coin telephones, train rides unfettered by noise. Gunnars has written in dialogue with thoughts and poems and works of Italo Calvino; Hélène Cixous; Annie Dillard; Hermann Hesse; Clarise Lispector; Toni Morrison; Alain Robbe-Grillet; Christa Wolf; W.B Yeats; Antonin Artaud; Jean Cocteau; Northrop Frye; Martin Heidegger; Susan Howe; Fredric Jameson; Søren Kierkegaard; Julia Kristeva; Anaïs Nin; Marcel Proust; Virginia Woolf, and others [like them].
Individual Reviews and notices:
Kabat, Jennifer. “10 Books That Shatter the Concept of Time.” Includes writeup on Zero Hour, one of the novellas in Scent of Light. New York: Electric Lit, May 28, 2024.
Rothstein, Kris. “A Lifelong Relationship: A Review of Kristjana Gunnars’ The Scent of Light. Vancouver: Prism International, April 28, 2022.
Review notice. Hollywood, California: Publishers’ Weekly. May, 2022.
Review notice. “The Year Ahead: 2022 In preview.” Chicago, Illinois: The Chicago Review of Books, May 17, 2022.
Frere-Jones, Sasha. “Exile, emotional truth, and writing as thinking in the works of Kristjana Gunnars.” New York: 4Columns, May 20, 2022. (online review journal)
Lemay, Shawna. “The Scent of Light by Kristjana Gunnars.” Edmonton, Alberta: Transactions With Beauty. May 27, 2022. (online blog)
McLennan, Rob. “Reading in the Margins: Kristjana Gunnars.” Ottawa, Ontario: robmclennan.blogpost.com. June 9, 2022. (online blog)
Review notice. Chicago, Illinois: 57th St. Books/Seminary Bookshop, Chicago. July 15, 2022.
Grizenko, Marisa. Vancouver, British Columbia: Plain Pleasures. June, 2022. (online review newsletter)
Review notice. Basel, Switzerland: Bider & Tanner, Kulturhaus im Basel. 2022.
Besner, Neil. “Moving meditations. Love, sorrow permeate Gunnars’ reflective writing across genres.” Winnipeg, Manitoba: Winnipeg Free Press, August 13, 2022.
Mies, Regan. “The Scent of Light by Kristjana Gunnars.” Necessary Fiction, September 5, 2022. (online review newsletter)
Carrera, Dashiel. “Review of The Scent of Light.” Minneapolis, Minnesota: Rain Taxi Review, 2022.
Matthews, Carol. “Review of the Scent of Light.” Vancouver: British Columbia Review, October 20, 2022.
Notice. “New Book of the Week, The Scent of Light.” Madison, Wisconsin: The Madison Books Newsletter, May 2022.
Reviews of Ruins of the Heart
This description is from the back of the published book, written by poet David Craig:
The first thing one notices in Kristjana Gunnars’ poetry is the stunning beauty of her lyrical mysticism. That would make the work well worth the read, but these poems do more. Restless, they widen; they take in the world. Moving beyond a search for metaphysical comfort, they confront age and the many faces of colonialism. Dante, in his concern for broken vows, offers the final wisdom: one of incompleteness. Like Kristjana, we will die thirsting for a lover we’ve too fleetingly known. Hopefully, like her, we will die singing.
Individual reviews
Lane, M. Travis. “Fragments of Eternity: A Review by M. Travis Lane of Kristjana Gunnars’ Ruins of the Heart, Six Longpoems. University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick: The Fiddlehead, September 21, 2022.
McLennan, Rob. “Kristjana Gunnars, Ruins of the Heart, Six Longpoems.” Rob McLennan’s Blog. August 28, 2022. (online blog review)
This is from Agnes Cserhàti’s review:
At Home in the Mountains: A Report on Knowledge, in Twenty Parts by Kristjana Gunnars is a remarkable chapbook in more ways than one. First of all, there is the fusion of what she terms “essay-poetry,” which lets her spread her literary wings over both genres, “allow[ing] some of the voices I have left out of the poems to enter the field.” It seems she has taken the cue in this from contemporary technology, the textual age in which we live, “brought on by the uses of the computer with all its tentacles” specifically the use of “hypertext” and “the many layers of text and information coming to us at once,” which urges a reading of the poems whose epigraphs of quotations and footnotes outnumber the poems themselves, 34 to 20. In this, Gunnars encourages a reading that is layered rather than serial, which is what inevitably I found myself doing, turning the pages every which way (except upside down), going over some poems several times as they seemed to echo others, then delving into the footnotes and back again. One thing became clear: this is not a work to be read but once, then put aside.
Cserháti, Agnes. “Review of At Home in the Mountains by Kristjana Gunnars.” Agnes Cserhàti’s poetry blog. April 26, 2019.
Reviews of At Home in the Mountains
Reviews of snake charmers
"A journey in the aftermath: snake charmers: a cycle of twenty poems." Review of Snake Charmers, by Subterranean Blue Poetry in Subterranean Blue Poetry, Vol. IV, Issue V, 2016.
"new from above/ground press: Kristjana Gunnars." Review of Snake Charmers by Eleni Zisimatos in "Featured Poets." Montreal: Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, March 2016.
Translations:
Zero Hour was published in French translation as: Degré zéro. Transl. Anne Malena. Montréal: Leméac Éditeurs, 1998.
The Prowler was published in French translation as: La maraude. Transl. Anne Malena. Montréal: Leméac Éditeurs, 1995.
Kristjánsdóttir, Helga Sóley. Snuðrarinn. Þýðing úr ensku á skáldsögunni The Prowler eftir Kristjönu Gunnars og umfjöllun um tengsl menningar vid þýðingar. M.A. Thesis, University of Iceland, 2010. Translation of The Prowler as part of an M.A. Thesis, University of Iceland.
Academic Work
Guðsteinsdóttir, Guðrún Björk. “Afnýlnduvæðing lesandans í The Prowler eftir Kristjönu Gunnars.” Paper delivered at RIKK, Hugvísindasvið Háskóla Íslands. Reykjavík, Þjóðminjasafn Íslands, November 30, 2023.
Quynn, K. “Reading and Writing in Kristjana Gunnars’s Rose Garden.” In: Silbergleid, R., Quynn, K. (eds), Reading and Writing Experimental Texts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017.
Gardner, Calum. Roland Barthes and English-Language Avant-Garde Poetry, 1970-1990. PhD dissertation, Cardiff University, UK. April 2016. (Includes a study of Gunnars’ books Carnival of Longing and Zero Hour).