It is a text that, with its many repetitions and its wonderful linguistic rhythm, has an addictive effect if one reads it in one go. Its linguistic expressions seem to reproduce even more language, and if one believes the poet herself, "This" was written completely by chance: When she sent the novel "Azorno" to the publisher in 1967, she realized that "This was it". This sentence became the catalyst for this poetic collection:
"This. This was it. This is. It continues. It moves. Further. It becomes. It becomes this, this and this. It goes beyond this. It becomes something else. It becomes more. It becomes something. Something new. Something increasingly new. It becomes immediately as new as it can be. It progresses. It meanders. It touches, it is touched. It captures scattered material. It grows more and more."

Despite its modest title, it is a rich poetic collection, around 250 pages long, which is rare for this genre of writing. Despite its length, "This" is not chaotic or unreadable, on the contrary, it has a very strict coherence. The poetic collection is divided into three main sections - the Prologue (526 verses), the Speech, and the Epilogue (528 verses), which constitute the largest part of the work and are further divided into three dramatic units: the Scene, the Text, and the Action, which are themselves divided into eight categories (symmetries, transitions, continuities, coherences, variabilities, extensions, integrities, universals), borrowed by Inger Christensen from the teachings of Danish linguist Viggo Brondal. Inger Christensen thus uses the numbers 3 and 8 as general principles of composition, as a mathematical system in which the text unfolds. The system as a literary tool plays a decisive role in Inger Christensen's work - especially in her poetic collection "Alphabet" from 1981.

The very first "This" of the Prologue appears as a material that, potentially, can be transformed into anything. It introduces a linguistic and at the same time physical creative process that becomes increasingly clear and differentiated as the "assembly machine" of the poem unfolds.
For Inger Christensen, the narrow boundaries of the system are not an obstacle. Paradoxically, the system acts creatively - as a generator. While the system deprives the poet of a part of her artistic freedom, at the same time her language gains a degree of independence, as suddenly the system and the language compose the poem. This way of using the system is a distinctive characteristic of Inger Christensen's work, but it also connects her to other poets of her time and to the literary movement that had taken the name "system poetry".