Description: Putting On My Species is about identity and selfhood, the desire for the very beginning, the sardonic pleasure of making and destroying in order to start over again, the love of poetry. How should I live? Sasja Janssen wonders. Who am I? Am I my memories? In a sober but moving style, Sasja Janssen gnaws away at her species.
Brief description: Sasja Janssen is a poet and novelist who lives in Amsterdam, where she also works as a teacher of Dutch as a second language. Querido, a major Amsterdam publisher, brought out two novels (2001 and 2005). Following the death of her father, Janssen has mainly written poetry, and has published four full collections, most recently Happy (2017). Putting On My Species was nominated for the prestigious VSB poetry prize, as the best poetry book of 2014. Janssen regularly publishes poems and short stories in major literary magazines and in the Amsterdam paper Het Parool.