Demon Removal Service

There is a performance at the trashy theatre. Hildegard Knef gets in a car. Rudolph Moshammer carries his Yorkshire Terrier around Munich. S. T. Coleridge makes a joke about Cologne. Works of art disappear. Something is rattling the window. Morning, noon, night. The Blackbird Pope. The people are starting to talk things. Music plays at the waste collection point. Elvis sweeps the driveway once more. I only read horse crime novels now and look for language in the grey area. The sleep laboratory at Potsdamer Platz. Hawthorn, marjoram, gorse...

Outrageous things happen in Marcel Beyer’s long-awaited new poems. In each of the poems comprised of precisely forty lines of verse, another character takes any liberty the strict limitations grant it, tells stories, paraphrases translations, creates sequences – in short: there is commotion, sometimes mayhem, so much so that ultimately, it has to be said: It’s getting serious! It’s time to call the Demon Removal Service.

»It’s […] the free flow of forms that makes this so appealing.« Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»... a masterpiece of authorial poetics, humour and analysis of society.« Helmut Böttiger, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»... a density that only a very few are in the overcrowded realms of contemporary poetry able to create.« Gregor Dotzauer, Der Tagesspiegel

»[…] inscrutable, crafty and entertaining. To stick with the demons: eerily good.« Martin Oehlen, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Marcel Beyer creates […] expressions that are as light as feathers« Carsten Otte, taz. die tageszeitung

»Beyer succeeds in confronting the grimacing language demons. [...] Reading these poems sparks great joy, because Beyer's mockery is accomplished and he responds to terror with ridicule.« Michael Opitz, Deutschlandfunk

»[The poems'] imagery is clear, so is their form, and they are so reliably surprising, so rich in connotations and ideas that reading them is a great pleasure as well as an inspiring challenge to look at the familiar in a completely new way.« Ulrich Kühn, NDR

»a sensation within the German-language literary scene.« Jörg Schieke, MDR