Nerve Impulses on the High-Voltage Power Line

Overview

With the precision of a scientist—part paleontologist, part neurologist, part musicologist—Arndís Lóa Magnsúdóttir explores language as adaptation for survival and what it means to acquire language and to lose it. In the space between words, the electric impulses that crackle between neurons produce alternative methods of communication, expression, and of navigating the modern world. The poems in Nerve Impulses on the High-Voltage Power Line hum and fizz, asking us to forget our preconceptions of what language is for, to let sound build inside the body and flow outward, and to rediscover the ways we move through the world. Words, as Arndís writes, “are not / for fulfilling basic needs / ... but for setting fire."

Author Biography

ARNDÍS LÓA MAGNÚSDÓTTIR is a writer and translator from Reykjavík. She holds a BA in French and Literature, as well as an MA in Translation Studies, from the University of Iceland. She has published two books of poetry, Taugaboð á háspennulínu and Skurn, as well as translations from French into Icelandic. Nerve Impulses on the High-Voltage Power Line was published in Iceland in 2020 by Una útgáfuhús to widespread acclaim. For the work, Magnúsdóttir received the Icelandic Literature Center’s Grassroots Grant and was nominated for the Maístjarna Poetry Prize for poetry book of the year. RACHEL BRITTON is a writer and translator from New York, based in Iceland. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the State University of New York at Geneseo and an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Iceland. She has received support from the Fulbright Commission, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, and the Icelandic Literature Center. Her translation of Brynja Hjálmsdóttir’s A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder was published in 2024 by Circumference Books.