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Underfoot - Niillas Holmberg

Underfoot

By: Niillas Holmberg, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs (Translator), Johanna Domokos (Translator), Inga-Wiktoria Pve (Illustrator)

Paperback | 24 January 2023

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In Underfoot, Holmberg asks what prevents an industrialized nation-state from achieving its desire to extract maximum resources.

His answers are people and their connection with land.
Writing in Northern Sami, he creates a world of symbols to enact the challenges of maintaining an immediate relationship with land in the midst of ongoing settler colonialism and displacement.

Specifically, Underfoot summons readers to return to their feet because that's where we're constantly in contact with the ground. The book's antagonist, the shoemaker, markets comfort and warmth. The moment that we put on the shoe is when we offer ourselves to capitalism and mechanization. That's when we replace our values of sustainability and communality with egoism and individuality.

The poetry is interwoven with illustrations by Sami artist, Inga-Wiktoria Pave.

Industry Reviews
"After a long hibernation, the voice of the Northern lands emerges through the poems of Niillas Holberg. In the quest for answers and solutions in these troubled times, we are called to listen to stories from the Earth's northern hemisphere. In these poems we are invited to know birches, terns, wolves and rivers as kin.
To feel the Earth again with our bare feet, bare hands and dive into the waters unfettered by the constraints of Modernity. The poems are simple, elegant, graceful, like the falling snow, clear cool water over stones in streams, birch leave rustling in the wind." --Miguel Rivera, translator of In the Courtyard of the Moon

"Underfoot is an irresistibly elegant, approachable and a unique entity by its expression; one of best books of poetry in 2019. The book is a downright magnificent entity in any criteria. Holmberg's poetic language and land are inseparably connected to each other." --Turun Sanomat

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