The eighteen poems that comprise Malene Engelund’s debut pamphlet, The Wild Gods, reveal a distinctly Nordic imagination, punctured with rich colour, shadows and light.

Here are letters, portraits and prayers, composed with an almost painterly precision. Searching and clear-eyed, each poem a compact saga that revives folklore and extends it into the present, Engelund’s wild gods take their places between borders: of home and belonging, darkness and dawn, the silenced and the lost.


“Malene Engelund has a lovely liquid way with verbs. Her phrase ‘DNA of flight’ applies not only to the birds who preside over these poems but to language itself as it flows through them, creating a haunted, Northern Lights habitat where snow, sea and night trace the inner bones of the relationship between every I and every you.”
— Ruth Padel

“Malene Engelund’s arresting debut leads us into a landscape of snow and silence, of characters submerged and on the brink of madness; ‘I write in black.’ But against the darkness we find the colours of a painter’s palette, of birds making for the sky, of voices refusing to be muted and claiming for themselves a new language.”
— Lorraine Mariner