To the Most Beautiful

Mette Moestrup

Translated from the Danish
by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Poetry in Translation
2024, Perfect Bound Trade Paperback, 7" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-947918-11-5

ABOUT TO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL
At once as supple and sly as it is spirited and smart, To the Most Beautiful is the second collection by the award-winning and renowned Danish poet Mette Moestrup to appear in English, in a tour de force translation by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. This collection of 117 poems takes readers on a thirteen-night journey of rumination, offering thirteen poems for each of the nine muses and taking its title from the ill-fated message that Eris wrote on the Apple of Discord, before dropping that golden bombshell into the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, leading to a vanity-plagued dispute among the goddesses that spawned The Trojan War. In To the Most Beautiful, Moestrup transfigures the infamous apple into Blood apples, honey hexagons, paradise apples, teardrops, orchards, and more, using constraints, ritual-based poetics, and numerical systems that seek to rupture binaries, all while working through the riddle of "what is beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful?" The award-winning Katrine Øgaard Jensen nimbly renders Moestrup's complex verse machines and the explicit and implicit structures that make them hum with exceptional savvy and skill. Now that you know, dear reader, what ritualized revelries, maximalist musings, and sylvan scenes await in To the Most Beautiful, will you take a bite?

PRAISE FOR TO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL
Swan-egged, paradise-appled, at once ant-high and cosmic, Mette Moestrup's To the Most Beautiful seats the reader in a clearing for the late-afternoon picnic of our existence as a species. Dame Science has just ripped away her mask to show her goddess-face. Which way will fortune tip? What intimacies, what violences might the lyric deliver like a viscous drip? In limber, pointed translation by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, this fetching, fatal work belongs beside those of Olga Ravn, Sara Stridsberg, Anne Carson and Sappho herself—weird sisters whose sweetbitter arrows hit the mark, every time.
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne and Deathstyles

I would call this book a thirteen-fold meditation on beauty, but "meditation" doesn't get at its raunch and riot, at the profuse thinginess of the world that Moestrup and Jensen make happen and in which I get to luxuriate. There are honey hexagons and dwarf planets, eggs (peak-egg: "A HYACINTH-WHITE EGG!") and hyacinths (peak-hyacinth: "AN EGG-SHAPED PINK HYACINTH"), a variety of blue flowers, gravestones, "jellyfish bubble wrap soapsuds crystal rainbows," and apples—chiefly the apple-bomb Eris threw into a party (she wasn't invited) inscribed with the word To the Most Beautiful. This was the apple that (more or less) launched the Trojan War. In these weird and wonderful poems, objects explode (into) pleasure, thought, history, and the material of language itself. Basically, the book had me at hello: "Picture a pyramid of eggs and apples. Would it be possible? What is beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful? Maximal full moon, you shine hyperbolically on city snow. Minimal fruit fly swarm, you swirl to the best of your ability over half a kiwi."
—Aditi Machado, author of Material Witness and Some Beheadings