These Hands

These Hands is an extraordinary bilingual poetry collection from renowned Danish poet Per Aage Brandt. The uniqueness of this work comes from the uniqueness of the person himself: unlike many other professor-poets, Brandt's academic discipline is not literature but semiotics, a field in which he has authored a dozen books and roughly two hundred and fifty articles. Many of the poems in this collection read like thought-experiments - as if the cognitive scientist made poetry his laboratory and theories his poems. But Brandt's work is also rich with humor and humanity. His poetry has a sense of playfulness and a sense of a personhood - someone behind the poem who doesn't take himself too seriously, even as he addresses profoundly serious subjects such as language, consciousness, and existence, mixing comedy with critique. In this exuberant and sharp-minded collection, Brandt re-sets the limits of language and creates a new kind of verse, prompting one Danish critic to remark that his work 'bears more resemblance to a brainwave than a book of poems.'