The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors Selected Prose Poems

Born in 1966, Nielsen works as a full time writer in Aarhus, the second largest Danish city, an academic and cultural center located on the peninsula of Jutland. Aarhus is also the home of the Grauballe Man, a bog man 2000 years old and displayed year round at Moesgaard Museum in a wooded area south of the city. This man, his cut open throat, his fractured shin, his beard stubble, his skin--even his fingerprints--preserved by the tannins of the bog, though flattened by its tremendous weight, lies displayed under glass, a ghastly testament to our common tribal past. I find in Nielsen's poems a similar spectacle--the little glass box of form, and, within, something old, nasty, fascinating, human.