Kristoffer Appelvik Lax

Kristoffer Appelvik Lax (born 1985) is a poet, critic, and instructor at the writing school at Biskops Arnö. He made his literary debut in 2021 with the poetry collection och vardagen då när vi stryker och kardar seriöst (20TAL), which was nominated for the Borås Tidning Debut Prize. His second collection, Hammele, was published in 2024 and has received widespread acclaim in his native Sweden.

Here, and gone

On Kristoffer Appelvik Lax’s och vardagen då när vi stryker och kardar seriöst

“A sign we are, uninterpreted.” This line, from a famous draft of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Mnemosyne”, pops into my head when I am re-reading Kristoffer Appelvik Lax’s debut poetry collection och vardagen då när vi stryker och kardar seriöst (“and everyday when we stroke and card gravely”). 

Hölderlin keeps wanting to chime in as I read on. In the last couple of years, I have returned to Appelvik Lax’s poems again and again. Each time they seem to invite new readings and encourage different associations. When the collection was published at the end of 2021, initial reception was varied and something of a slow burn. One or two critics tried to make sense of implied relationships, in search of narrative. Some referred to the history of handicraft as metaphor in poetry (there have been a few such examples published in Sweden during the 2020’s). Others made a point out of how these poems bring attention to language itself – as a repository for another kind of presence. Poet and critic Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson wrote: “Instead of a victory for the distinct statement, it is one for the riddle, attention, question.”

Like so many great books of poetry, it is a world unto itself – but also so much more. Appelvik Lax’s unmistakable style features a mixture of archaisms, wordplay and everyday speech, brought together in fragmented clauses. The poems are characterized by an almost complete lack of delimiters. Instead, spacing and what might seem like redundant connective words create rhythm and breath. 

The title implies a handling of materials which is central throughout. It begins with a quote from “Poem of the end”, by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), which serves as a reading instruction of sorts:

For – with no superfluous words, 

No magnificent word – love is a line of sutures.

But what about love? A you is frequently addressed in the poems. Ubiquitous, the addressee flickers just out of reach, withdrawing from attempts at clear-cut classification. Is it a lover? Parent? Friend? God? Part of a stanza reads “I thought you saw me after all I was singing”. Another line, “when will you return as image?”, seems to invoke that wholly unbridgeable gap between absence and presence; sign and signified. The speaker is doubtful and quizzical – lost in thought while crisscrossing and traversing the rhythms and turns of time through the spinning and carding of fibers, seasonal shifts, love, death.

The relationship between life and thread is ancient, wherein lives are constantly twisted and mended using various strands of experience – only to unravel, or snap. This realization seems to saturate those intimate moments of everyday life, which form the backdrop of the collection, with a kind of radiance. Oil in chest hairs during Epiphany, a gentle kiss in hair which is soft like wool. Through texture his poems capture that close-knit ambiance of love and desire. But to put it like this is not enough – rather, we are made part of a landscape where things are barely solid. Reality, such as it is, seems veiled. Lives are constantly twisted and bound around each other, always on the verge of breaking or dissolving. Where there is love, there is loss. It reverberates in how poems evoke fragility through the brittleness of materials – “in a kingdom of glass everything may break / this applies to for example a tree or a parent” – and inevitable decay: “all the flowers that exist are dying”. 

One can easily extract a vibe of finality from these lines. Here, and gone. But they also express something else, which is embedded in the passage of time. Appelvik Lax’s vocabulary is not only one of love and loss, but also of grace:

he rubs me with little leaves and rose

the pain scatters and of brightly red

leading me with a hand of light and words

the pillow then and how it smells    me when I

begin again with rose on my tongue

begin again in water    begin again in wool

Another poem refers to the highest form of love: agape. It is the choice to extend love unconditionally, while also expressing the relationship between humanity and the divine:

I remember everything as if I had already imagined it

like: agape    to gape

to let what needs to happen    happen

Somewhat rare, the wordplay here still “works” in translation. Agape, as both noun and adjective. Surrounded by experiences of love and loss, these lines appear to underline a need for hope and wonder. Or at the very least suggest the importance to look for them, despite everything.

The images of Appelvik Lax’s poems are peculiar and singular in their composition, while still having a sense of familiarity to them. Glimpses of everyday life provide all the assuredness we’re allowed. A few people are named, and that initial you sometimes transforms into we, he or him. Still, they seem to be both someone and no one. I say this, because there is a poignancy to his poetry that hits home regardless of intent. Similarly to that voice in “Mnemosyne”, the speaker attempts to make some small sense of their self and the world. To vibrate close to an other, whether present or absent, and draw slightly closer to himself in the process.

- Alexander Svedberg