Karma Goat

Karmageitin and Gentukamarið are interconnected poems and a play exploring female identity and memory through intertwined narratives.

Karmageitin (Karma Goat) and Gentukamarið (“A Girl’s Room") are a literary pair, each having its own expression and character. They are written in two different genres, poems (Karma Goat) and a play (A Girl's Room). The works can be read in any order, and are not linearly or causally connected, but rather as two nested works, where the dialogues of the drama, the movements of the poems, the states of mind and the physical spaces, grow into each other. As the title A Girl's Room indicates, it is about a female protagonist. The same is the case in Karma Goat.

Here we follow the poet as a middle-aged woman. The poems are located in the woman's home, but arise and grow out of her childhood bedroom. It is from here that the poet's perception of the world springs, and here that it is linked to the family. The room has been passed down from the aunt to the poet. A remarkable insistence is found in the movement of the poems; a longing and a desire to become part of the world, but the desire to connect is turned inside out and returns home to the girl's childhood bedroom, or the kitchen of midlife crisis; not necessarily out of a direct longing for home, but as a necessity. As soon as the poem has returned home, the poet is made invisible and exhaustion sets in, and so begins the growing of a new longing.