We are not even 2 percent of the way through the 1,000 years that will comprise the third millennium of the common era, yet if forced to make a guess of what may characterize this new age, one might cautiously utter the word “flow.” The things we consume drift in ever greater numbers across the ocean waters and our thoughts fly out on the aether in a torrent unimaginable even two decades ago, be they over cellular networks, WhatsApp, Twitter, Skype, Snapchat, Facebook, what have you. It is a time of global migrations, an era of newfound interest in transiting back and forth across the once firm boundaries of gender, an expansion of linguistic translation and transformation, and even (in some corners) dreams of exiting the material body altogether and discovering a kind of transhumanity as a pure flow of information.

The ecstatic, euphoric, helter-skelter, and self-contradictory movement that currently animates technological humanity at its most optimistic much resembles the churn found in Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s multi-award-winning book-length poem Third-Millennium Heart. It is a deceptively calm-looking work of brief poems whose lines feel more like energetic prose sentences than the recondite lyricism generally associated with “experimental poetry.” Yet Olsen makes from these modest implements a work of great compression, precision, ingenuity, force, and provocation—most of all, a work where definitions, bodies, meanings, images, and personalities are ever flowing into each other, striving toward a state of complete universality.

Third-Millennium Heart’s conversational tone ranges from irony and occasional glibness to incantation, prophesy, and fiery anger. Its favored techniques are leaping logic and shocking, sharpening statements, recurring motifs and coinages that build up a thick residue over the course of these 200 pages. There is a fidgety energy here that often feels like someone in the throes of obsessive-compulsive disorder manically flipping a light switch or feverishly checking the lock on the front door, and it really works, giving these lines a sense of urgency and propulsive forward momentum. Amid all of this motion, there are little eddies where the poem stops to take its breath, as in this sentiment, which one finds repeatedly in various forms throughout the book:

The goal is for an utterance to not demand an answer: a utopia
inserted between the divided parts of the existing void.

Once there, all vessels will be connected.

One implicitly feels that the Third-Millennium Heart strains toward this wholeness, but Olsen’s titular heart is a construct that resolutely “expand[s] on closer inspection,” an infinite regression and never stops yielding new worlds in its finer details: “Each chamber consists of four chambers / that each consist of four chambers / that each consist...