Lemon in Orbit

"Tuesday fell on a Friday / Doors fell off their hinges [...] These are not bad times / only badly behaved times" ('London-Hong Kong'). Somewhere between the quirky wisdom of Dr. Seuss and the compressed surrealism of Selima Hill, these poems are cheeky and exhilarating, full of strange insights and eternal truths dressed up as onions strapped to the legs (to paraphrase a line from 'Globetrotter'). That Ole is an artist can be seen and felt viscerally in his mesmerizing debut collection. "With what I could fit in a bucket / I made my way through the labyrinth // I was both the mover and the maze / as they say in these parts of the garden" ('Millennium'). "Comic, but deadly serious too, Hagen's poems are mythograms from another spacetime. Anyone looking for straightforward meaning will be frustrated here; these words are not for you but for something inside you. Reading Hagen's verses is like reading precise communiques from another world that is nevertheless within this one. Has poetry ever meant anything else?" - Simon O'Sullivan, artist and co-author of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy