About
Kathleen Maris Paltrineri is a poet and translator from Iowa. She is the recipient of a 2021-2022 Fulbright Fellowship to Norway and a Lois Roth Endowment Award for translation research. Her translation of Norwegian poet Kristin Berget's and when the light comes it will be so fantastic is now available for pre-order from Curbstone Press, an imprint of Northwestern University Press. This translation was supported by a Stanley Graduate Award for International Research and excerpts have appeared in Guernica, Circumference Magazine, Brink, and Poetry in Action.
For her own poetry, Paltrineri has received scholarships and residencies from USF Verftet, Arctic Circle Residency, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Jentel Artist Residency. Paltrineri’s poems have recently appeared in Bone Bouquet, Bennington Review, CALYX, and jubilat. Five poetry light projections from her ARCHIPELEGIES series were exhibited 2023-2024 at Neue Galerie Berlin in “Traces,” a group show by artists, writers, and educators. ARCHIPELEGIES explores converging crises—the pandemic and the climate catastrophe—through the mediums of poetry, photography, and light projection.
She has taught Literary Translation, Creative Writing, and Literature at the University of Iowa; Creative Writing at Cornell College; English as a Second Language at the University of New Hampshire; and Beginning Norwegian Language courses at the Mindekirken Language and Culture Program. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.
Featured Work
and when the light comes it will be so fantastic
A new and singular translation of an award-winning author and poet
Norwegian poet Kristin Berget’s 2017 Brage Prize–nominated poetry collection and when the light comes it will be so fantastic weaves together themes of ecological and linguistic loss, memory and deep time, and motherhood and grief. Berget’s poetics point to landscapes used as sites of extraction, where exhausted phosphorus, starving clay layers, and forest machines are encountered. The poems in this collection traverse forests, deserts, and seas—their poetic matter separated by fields of caesuras, visual absences suggestive of Earth’s ongoing extinctions. As jurors of the Brage Prize commented, within these pages is a universe where humans can seldom be separated from one another or from the nature they live in and among. Berget’s first book translated into English is an innovative exploration of the climate crises we are living with today and the complex emotions that ebb and flow along with it.
Praise for the Book
“Word by word, Berget’s ecopoetry is like water drops falling from icicles, turning the jagged and hard matter of environmental degradation into pure light before disappearing into earth. Paltrineri’s translation is breathtakingly poetic and precise.”
—Aron Aji, translator of Bilge Karasu, The Garden of the Departed Cats
“Aesthetically and philosophically compelling, this poetry is stimulating, sonically rich, and semantically complex. Paltrineri’s remarkable translation is as inventive, harrowing, and uplifting as the original.”
—Gabriel Gudding, author of Literature for Nonhumans
