For over three decades, the work of Kristin Omarsdottir has thrived in the vanguard of Icelandic literature. Waitress in Fall offers anglophone readers the first substantial selection of her poems in translation. Spanning thirty years and seven collections - from her first to her latest - this wide-reaching introduction celebrates a vital voice in contemporary European poetry. Kristin Omarsdottir's work resists the sweet, the neat or the certain. Her poems delight in the lush mess of actual life, in its hands and fingers, lemons and clocks, socks, soldiers, snow, knives, mothers, nightstands, sweat, and crockery. The domestic is at the heart of the poems, but it is a domesticity tinged with threat: something `clear and ominous' persists between the lines. These are surreal, unsettling landscapes, in which children lap milk from trees and car tyres are `soft as skin'. But Kristin's poems are also full of laughter, sex, and love. They accept vulnerability as a condition of intimacy. Erupting `wherever thirst is ignited', they are not afraid to strike, to rage, recognising a right - a responsibility - to risk the necessary word, even to `wound the language'.

'The world is so ready for the phantasmic heft of Kristin Omarsdottir. Her poems are transcribed dreams: too wet to be dirty, and absurdly funny - in a lightless girlhole - while deeply serious. Waitress in Fall does it all. Omarsdottir's poems are gigantically passionate, macabre, timely, glorious, and real.' - Eileen Myles; 'A bracing, beautiful book... Omarsdottir excels at creating pleasurable tension. These poems are like icecold milk , pure yet animal; invigorating to consume.' - Clare Pollard; 'It's a unique volume that presents the reader with a remarkable picture of a poet's career. Kristin's unmistakable voice escorts the reader from early leaps into middle-aged maturity, with lines that trip into one another, passing swiftly from lightness to despair and back again... As the poems drive the reader onward through the decades, passing haunting landscapes, surreal scenes of domestic life and shrines to the physicality of womanhood, there is a sense of rhythm and voice that carries throughout.' - Bjoern Halldorsson, The Reykjavik Grapevine

Kristin Omarsdottir (1962-) is the author of seven collections of poetry, five books of short stories, seven novels, and half a dozen plays. Her novels have been translated into many languages including Swedish, French, and English. Her awards include the DV Cultural Award for Literature, the Icelandic Women's Literature Prize, and the Icelandic national prize for playwright of the year. She has been nominated for the Icelandic Literary Award four times, as well as the Nordic Council Literary Prize.