"This is a threat." That's how Hackers, Swedish writer Aase Berg's seventh book of poetry, begins. Hackers is a furious, feminist book about wanting to "hack" the patriarchal system-both in the physically violent sense and in the sense of computer hacking. But Berg also reveals the 'hag' behind the 'hack,' channeling the non-compliant rage of Glenn-Close-as-bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction. The world Berg "hags" back at is a world of sexist, capitalist, environmental, globalized violence. The fury of the hacker/hag/captive/revenger is constantly boiling up on the edges of Berg's compounds and highways, threatening to infiltrate the center. In these spectacular battle scenes and hacked pastorals, where nature is besieged by the highways of progress and the animals don't give a damn about the humans, the hag rises.

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson. Berg's hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated--drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, DARK MATTER aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: "a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system's last chance to communicate with the dying I." The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations."Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark."--China Mieville"Aase Berg's poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries.... When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseated and almost seasick from her texts."--Asa Beckman