NERVE IMPULSES ON THE HIGH-VOLTAGE POWER LINE | BOOK TALK

Join us on November 17 for a virtual book talk on Arndís Lóa Magnsúdóttir’s Nerve Impulses on the High-Voltage Power Line, (Saturnalia Press, October 2026). Magnsúdóttir’s translator Rachel Britton will be joined by a moderator for readings and discussions.

Winner of the 2025 Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, Nerve Impulses on the High-Voltage Power Line is a smoldering study of our human need for language. 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.”

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