Eskatos and the Stretched Necks of Stillness

The English-language debut and foremost work of lauded Nordic poet Mats Söderlund, winner of the 2025 Karin Boye Literary Prize, the 2024 Norrland Literature Prize, and the Swedish Catapult Prize. In a sweeping but intimate blend of ecopoetry, mythology, and political verse, Eskatos & the Stretched Necks of Stillness communes with Sweden’s primeval woodlands during an age of transformation. These collected poems lead the reader down overgrown paths, beyond the flickering of leaves and lichen, to meet the dead: a troop of scattering spirits that Söderlund sets out to praise, and to mourn. Shining of rain and gnawing of sorrow, cast from stone, frost, surgical nails, and charcoal ash, Söderlund’s hypnotic ode forms a fragile tether to a world and past that threatens to slip through our fingers, and which no generation who seeks to survive can disclaim.