Malena Mörling
POET · TRANSLATOR · PROFESSOR OF CREATIVE WRITING
“Malena Mörling has the gift of looking at ordinary things with such wonder it can feel like visionary hunger.”
ROBERT HASS
ABOUT
Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm in 1965 and grew up in southern Sweden. She is the author of Ocean Avenue and Astoria, with a third book, Lumina Station, forthcoming from Alice James Books. She has translated Tomas Tranströmer and other Swedish poets, and teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
BOOKS
Lumina Station
Alice James Books · 2026
"Lumina Station is truly a book of astonishments."
— Jenny George
Astoria
University of Pittsburgh Press · 2006
“Dreamy amazement at the world’s weird plenty.”
— NYRB
Ocean Avenue
New Issues Press · 1999
“Subtle, lovely, and original.”
— Gerald Stern
A POEM
Traveling
Like streetlights
still lit
past dawn,
the dead
stare at us
from the framed
photographs.
You may say otherwise,
but there they are,
still here
traveling
continuously
backwards
without a sound
further and further
into the past.
“Malena Mörling is a writer who is not afraid to feel or imagine and who has the exceptional talent required to make an original voice.”
STUART DYBEK
“Low-key, minimalist, utterly unpretentious and yet… they speak about the central conditions of our lives as few poems do.”
ED OCHESTER, THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY
“A chronicler of wonders, she has an astonishingly fresh sensibility as well as a profound humility in the presence of created things.”
PHILIP LEVINE
TRANSLATIONS
The Star by My Head
An anthology of eight of Sweden’s most highly regarded poets, including Edith Södergran, Gunnar Ekelöf and Tomas Tranströmer. Milkweed Editions, 2014.
