I have written poetry since seventh grade. However, back then I obviously had no idea anything would ever come of it. I still hadn’t realized how powerful poetry could be.
The Turning Point
High school. First year. Danish class. Two poems by two different poets struck home within the same lesson. “Til mine forældre” (To my parents) by Gustaf Munch-Petersen, and “Erindring” (Memory) by Tove Ditlevsen.
The sheer force of those poems turned my impression of poetry upside down. It wasn’t just words arranged so that they rhymed. It was an opportunity to make people not merely understand, but also feel something.
From then on, I knew I wanted to write. And I tried. But my mastery of English wasn’t great back then, and writing poetry in Danish turned out to be way too personal, to the point of uncomfortable. It just came too close.
Themes: Loneliness. Alienation. Isolation. Adolescence. Sadness. Depression. Very personal stuff essentially.
So… When Did It Really Kick Off?
Summer 2010. I was 19. My life had taken a turn for the worse, and as I came to discover in the following years: Every time something bad happened, so did poetry.
That’s the time I REALLY started writing, and realized that I now had the ability to express what I wanted to express, in a way so that people could actually understand me.
I wrote my first poetry collection in 2010 – it was called “Whirlpool” – and circulated it among friends and family. However, later on I dismantled it and incorporated the poems into other collections.
After that time, there was no going back. I wrote daily for the next several years – many of these poems have been compiled later on in “What Bits of Peace My Life’s Ensured“, and “Confessions of the Cold Light of Dawn“. Many others have simply been discarded.
Themes: Nature. Writing. Philosophy. Self-reflection. Alienation. Loneliness. Metaphysics. Love, unavoidably.
My More Mature Work
My “new style” was born after an education-induced hiatus of two years. In 2016 I finally felt able to tackle writing poetry in Danish. “De spor man efterlader sig” – my first Danish-language collection – came into being. It is a sad collection that reflects on the past and changing times.
After that, I went back to writing in English again with “Seen From a Distance People Lose Their Eyes” which is written in the same style I developed while writing in Danish. It primarily deals with loss, isolation, writing and reflection.
After that, I wrote “Light Requires Darkness” as the closing of a chapter. It started with material left over from “Seen From a Distance…” and then just grew and grew. I wrote myself out of a depression and into a new future with that collection. The last poem I wrote on the collection was written on the day I got together with my now husband. That event changed so much for me, that it just seemed like a natural place to end the collection.
The next poetry collection I wrote was ‘divisive / dismissive / missive‘. It is fragmentary and written in a fit of rage after a dispute (long in the coming) with various family members who had watched me being miserable for years, never raising a hand (or voice) to offer any kind of help. I needed to get some things off my chest… and somehow it ended up evolving into a critique of social media and alienation in modern society in general – and the fragmentary nature of it suddenly seemed to make sense in that context. Which wasn’t planned, but just happened along the way.
It is, in terms of style, by far the most experimental collection I have written.
Themes: Identity. Belonging. Loss. Change. Family. Alienation. Technology and its Effects. Depression. Communication. Self-acceptance. Love.
Closing a Chapter and Starting Anew
After that, it took me a long time to put together a lot of stray essays and poems into a collection that went under several working titles until I eventually settled on “30 after thoughts” since a lot of it kinda sorta co-incided with my 30th birthday.
As that collection was primarily made out of left-over material, it ended and closed off a lot of projects in one swoop. Allowing me to look forward and start anew, which was kind of the whole point. If the collection seems a bit disjointed, that is an inevitable side effect of its inception.
After that, I didn’t write for over 3 years.
I was busy studying and working – my life had taken a new turn, I was changing careers and everything was new and confusing. And writing just didn’t ever get to the forefront of my mind given that I was working 80+ hours a week. And when I wrote it was academic papers. Poetry just got pushed out for a while.
In the summer of 2025 I was finally done with my studies. After travelling for a month I got into back into a more regular job schedule. And then what? My life was basically fine, and my past poetry had been spurred on my pain and misery. So how write?
It turns out that it wasn’t impossible. It was just different. It took more time and deliberation. But it was doable. And since my past projects had been completed, I was free to start over completely and build on the new knowledge and perspectives I had gained in the preceding years. Turn a new page, so to speak.
So I am currently working on a new Danish-language collection called “verden værker” and an English collection with the working title “Palimpsest”. Both will hopefully see the light of day in 2026.
Themes: Aging. Family. Death of loved ones. Modern society. Technology. Culture. Nature. History. Religion. And a whole lot besides.