Inventarium

Pedro Carmona-Alvarez

Original title: Inventarium
Publisher: Kolon forlag, 2020
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 160 pages

Inventarium is an ambitious and expansive poetry collection that continues the literary conversations found throughout Pedro Carmona-Alvarez’s wider body of work. Here, the poems take up questions of lineage, loss, landscapes, animals, violence, dreams and nightmares. The poetry is vivid, insistent, and melancholic; the voices that speak in these texts try to understand who they are, where they are, what they have endured, and how both personal and inherited experiences can be given language.

Inventarium can also be read as a poetic echo of the essay collection Refrains (2019).

Foreign rights

World English: under offer

In 2020, the versatile Carmona-Alvarez returned to poetry—and we should be grateful he did. The collection comprises melodious poems that oscillate between autobiography and poetry.

Bergens Tidende, Best Books of the Year 2020

Pedro’s powerful poetic voice leaves no one untouched. In Inventarium, he uses his poems to give a voice to all people—even those who were brutally robbed of theirs.

NRK

Refreshing: Inventarium is seductive and strikes at life’s most tender pain points with stunning precision.

Klassekampen

Pedro Carmona-Alvarez

Pedro Carmona-Alvarez was born in La Serena, Chile, in 1972. At the age of ten, he and his family fled to Argentina, and the family later moved to Norway. He made his debut with a collection of poetry in 1997, and has since published several award-winning books. The Weather Changed, Summer Came and So On was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award in 2017.