Indiscreet Ghosts - by Caroline Bergvall (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A retrospective collection of essays and performance texts on poetics and art-making by award-winning poet and sound artist Caroline Bergvall.

With characteristic curiosity, erudition, and precision, Caroline Bergvall articulates the poetics and process behind eleven interdisciplinary performance projects written over the past twenty-five years. Over the course of these essays, process notes, and performance texts, she reveals her persistent engagement with writing, translation, collaboration, soundworks, spatial practice, drawing, and song, all the while continuously asking how to live and make work, how to navigate displacement and disconnection, and how to reckon with the violence and vibrancy living in and between languages.

Review Quotes

"Caroline Bergvall has emerged over the past decade as one of the most brilliantly inventive poets of our time."--Charles Bernstein, in praise of Meddle English

"It is a book as filled with ghosts as with beauty, as driven by intellect as by wanderlust--a richly rewarding and memorable experience."--Publishers Weekly Starred Review, in praise of Drift

About the Author

Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist working across languages, media, and contexts. Her practice encompasses books, performances, installations, sound works, and drawing. She often explores materials from both contemporary and historical sources, often in collaboration with others. Her books include Fig (2005), Meddle English (2011), Drift (2015), and Alisoun Sings (2019). She has received a Cholmondeley Award (UK) and the Bernard Heidsieck Literary Art Prize (Centre Pompidou, Paris). A Henry Moore Artist Fellow (2024), she is currently a Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Studies, London. Of French-Norwegian heritage, she is based in London.