Winner of the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize

In Nerve Impulses on the High-Voltage Power Line, human language is explored as a form of evolutionary adaptation. With the precision of a scientist—part paleontologist, part neurologist, part musicologist—Arndís examines what it means to acquire language and to lose it, to build sound inside the body and to feel it crackle and flow outward. With an electric sense of compassion, these poems ask us to forget our preconceptions of what language is and is for, to discover it anew, and to reconsider the ways we move through the world. Words, as Arndís writes, “are not / for fulfilling basic needs / ... but for setting fire”.

Forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in October 2026