Long, Long Goodbyes

Translation of: Pitkät Hyvästit

Heidi Liehu

Translated from the Finnish by Kathleen Osgood Dana

6 X 9 inches, 66 pages

Heidi Liehu is a relentless maker of meaning. Schooled in French feminism and with a doctorate in philosophy, she makes poems that are beauteous and memorable, emerging word and image out of the chaos and surge of emotion. Long, Long Goodbyes charts the flickering of a passionate affair in six phases of existential angst and amazement. In these poems Liehu makes long farewells to her lover over the course of a summer, hovering over a kiss or a gesture. She follows the seasons, global and emotional, galactic and illogical, shivering with the clinging ache of rejection.

Liehu pays precise attention to language and to the clear, definite articulation of those things that are murky and ill-defined. Kathleen Osgood Dana, who translated this volume in close collaboration with Liehu, delighted in working Liehu's image-rich language and the way that her Finnish has been stripped to its syntactic and semantic core.

Heidi Liehu

Author

Born in 1967, Heidi Liehu is one of the leading feminist scholars in Helsinki. Her writings include works of poety; a play written with her poet-mother, Rakel Liehu; a philosphical-lyrical meditation on feminism and language; and a manifesto about "the final future."

Kathleen Osgood Dana

Translator

Kathleen Osgood Dana is a long-time student of Finnish and northern literature, and a Ph.D. candidate in Sami literature at the University of Oulu, Finland. Director of the Russian School at Norwich University, Dana lives with her family in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she grew up.