”Outside the Institution is a rarely sensitive poetry-collection that opens rooms that make us wiser, more generous and more insightful … Poetic and well-written … Significant and gripping … This is a poetic project which demands huge respect”
Dag og tid
”Outside the Institution must be read slowly and several times”
Haugesunds Avis
”Strong images of psychiatric patients. Lars Amund Vaage is a great name within prose writing in Norway. The fact that he is also a fine poet is less known … Natural and transgressing … Powerful images of the devastation of illness, incomprehendible actions, words, and sounds … this is a poetry-collection practically free of a single unimportant word”
Aftenposten
”Astoundingly strong about normality and insanity, language and muteness, and the uncompromising life we cannot protect ourselves from”
VG, Critics’ favourites
”Fascinating poems about insanity and life at an institution … Vaage’s quiet, trustful and melancholy poems have obvious epic elements”
Bergens Tidende
”Lars Amund Vaage’s new poetry-collection is a strong, personal and versatile story of insanity’s ways and forms of communication inside and outside the institutions. The most important collection of poetry this year? Vaage writes with poetic authority, quiet intensity and skilled distance to matter and thematic. A quiet despair and an experienced sorrow are quivering inthe momentous, myhologised and realistic poetry-horizon … The main focus is the mad and the madness’ place and interpretations, individually and collectively. It is a great achievement to impart such a drawn out subject in such a new and probing way”
VG
”This year’s strongest poetry-collection about ageing and dementia … Vaage is best known for his novels, but his lyrical debut five years ago was a pleasant surprise. In a sense, it was like a homecoming, as if some of the best qualities of Vaage’s gift and distinctive character come into its own in poetry. I hope he continues to shake a few poems out of his sleevein the years to come … a great book”
Stavanger Aftenblad
”Unusually strong about understanding and insanity … Vaage’s book is brave and good … The poems are written ”outside the institution”. Yet they peek in. And the crazy comes out … Lars Amund Vaage’s poetry-collection is a good attempt at approaching madness from other sides than normal prose, like many of his previous books have done too”
Klassekampen
”Poems about the mad in the right way … The whole book is marked by the author’s confident pen, a language which in its specific way makes scenery and emotions, questions and answers arise and weather in front of our eyes. A poetry alive and unruly, which makes us keep reading because it is interesting. The poems about the mad are written with a contagious energy and a diction that makes us want to find out where it is all going … A poetry-collection about madness, cars and love has to appeal, right?”
Dagbladet
