(63) 1, 2, 3, 4 
Im Zimmer meines Vaters

Friedrich Ani

In My Father's Room

Poetry owes many evergreens to »occasional poems«. In the case of Friedrich Ani, such poems constitute deliberate addressing, musically worded compositions if one considers current political-individual situations the occasion to which one must react immediately, showing oneself and the counterpart in all its vulnerability. These realistic-spontaneous sounds find very different forms: from the rhyming short poem to the prose poem to the extensive cycle.

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Halbzeug

Hannes Bajohr

Wrought Material

When everything is text, because everything is code, there is no more work, only wrought material, a semi-finished product. Images, films, sounds, words – in the digital world, everything is open to being (re)processed, transcoded and developed. Hannes Bajohr’s volume of poetry proves that astute poems can be created from recycled texts. Inspired by the avantgarde of modernity, he employs 21st-century technique: aided by algorithms, he has fragmented, transcribed and reordered Kafka‘s novels, government protocolls climate reports and much more. In doing so, his poems open up an entirely different perspective on reception and authorship in the age of digitalisation.

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English world rights (Counterpath Press)

Dämonenräumdienst

Marcel Beyer

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, majoram, gorse...

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Kreuzzug mit Hund

Nora Bossong

Crusade with a Dog

In her new volume of poetry, Nora Bossong travels from small-town Germany to the Mediterranean and onwards into the Holy Land and beyond. Her natural manner of movement a shifting back and forth in time. Hungry for experience, she explores poetic scenes from a past hundred of years old and a distilled present. Almost as if by chance, she directs her lens on people, places and traditions, describing them with subtle humour and sensitivity while leaving their secrets intact.

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English world rights (Seagull)

»etwas ganz und gar Persönliches«

Paul Celan

»an entirely personal matter«

Paul Celan’s exceptional oeuvre of letters – half of them unpublished so far: An oeuvre, on par with the poetic works, of immense stylistic range. Biographically insightful and poetologically fruitful.

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Die Gedichte

Paul Celan

Poems

Celan’s collected poems – for the first time in their entirety and with new commentary. Close to 60 more poems than the 2003 edition. The history of their origins, sources, cross-references: broken down with summaries and individual notes.

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Florida-Räume

Ann Cotten

Florida-Spaces

»Want to earn money writing? Want to disclose your most intimate thoughts?« Naturally, people reacted to our invitation in the classifieds and sent in texts. Some of them have been gathered in the present portfolio, which we have tentatively entitled »Florida-Spaces«, borrowed from one of the more unconventional submissions. Its author is the Marienfeld School, a group of philosophising dogs, one of whom, a cocker spaniel/architectural critic, happened upon the one from that requires further examination: the provisional projection, the leaning greenhouse, the post-modern sickness of the mind, the Florida-Space. Other individuals submitted poems, like Bettine, Bettine’s Mother, a revolutionary caddisfly and former Stasi-agent who keeps a journal about her dreams. The texts have been annotated to aid the reader’s understanding.

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Fremdwörterbuchsonette

Ann Cotten

Sonnets from the Dictionary of Borrowed Words

Weighed down by few associations, artificial, new, or existing in our everyday language merely temporarily – loan words seem to apologise for their existence: »I’m only fulfilling a conceptual function, occupying a job for which there’s no qualified German available at the moment.«

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Verbannt!

Ann Cotten

Banned!

Billowing palm trees, a rustle in the celery, a tiger disappears, an atomic bomb detonates in the distance, and a consciousness starts moving backwards. The latter belongs to a TV presenter who has been banished to a deserted island due to numerous instances of grave misconduct, equipped with (as per her own choice) a knife, a grindstone and Meyers Konversations-Lexikon.

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Val di Non

Oswald Egger

Val di Non

Can you imagine a mountain without its corresponding valley? If you can imagine both God and the world, can you manage to imagine, for example, God without the world? That which hovers before your mind’s eye, from A to Z, often appears more real than what’s confusingly in front of you.

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Die Geschichte der Wolken

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

The History of the Clouds

In these 99 meditations, Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes a very close look at things: He feels that clouds are alien and yet symbols of human life. He captures the individual miniscule detail, the fleeting moment and lends it the dignity of presence; and he seeks out the eternal, the law in which being born and dying are but two sides of transience.

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English world rights (Seagull), Spanisch world rights (Poesia Senor Hidalgo), France (Vagabonde), Italy (Einaudi), Korea (Saemulgyul)

Kiosk

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Kiosk

The kiosk around the corner – outside, it has a lot on offer. Inside, in the semi-darkness, sits a man or a woman, but what they are thinking is a different story altogether. In the past, of course, kiosks couldn’t be found in the city centre but in quiet parks and spacious gardens: delicate pavillons, hexagonal or octagonal, open on all sides. The word ›kiosk‹ comes from Turkish where ›köşk‹ means ›garden hut‹ and the Turks borrowed both the graceful architecture as well as the word from the Persians.

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Italy (Einaudi); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Bloodaxe), Netherlands (Uitgeverij P), Denmark (Gyldendal), Sweden (Norstedts), Israel (Hakkibutz Hameuchad)

Leichter als Luft

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Lighter than Air

»As well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. […] Lighter than Air, his [...] collection of moral poems, weighs lightness against seriousness. These are witty, lightly ironic poems on all kinds of subjects, easy in style, engaging in tone, often conversational. Enzensberger is a cultured, learned, widely knowledgeable man, but his poems wear their knowledge, learning and culture very lightly. Perfectly at ease in a variety of poetic forms, he presents us again and again with things that matter.

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Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: USA (Sheep Meadow Press), UK (Bloodaxe), Spanish world rights (La Poesia Senor Hidalgo), Italy (Einaudi), Netherlands (Uitgeverij P)

Wirrwarr

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Babel

Babel! A word seemingly born from chaos in its alliterating, rolling urgency. The poet pulls several examples of how deception and self-deceit, misjudgements and failing routines determine everyday life out of the hat, amused, cryptic and sad.

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Aus der Traum (Kartei)

Durs Grünbein

From the Dream (Files)

The title of a book of poetry could not be any more provocative, and still the poet allows no room for doubt: »In general, that which we call reality is greatly overestimated.« Therefore, with all the power of his imagination, in the first half of his book he leads us into the stormy areas of that reality which most people consider the measure of all things.

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France (selection; 17 Muscles)

Cyrano oder Die Rückkehr vom Mond

Durs Grünbein

Cyrano or Returning from the Moon

What is going on? The Americans are abandoning the moon, leaving the earth’s seemingly dead companion to stragglers. Time to recapitulate: On a Sunday afternoon in Berlin, on the airfield of the disused Tempelhof Airport, poet Durs Grünbein makes a momentuous observation.

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Den Teuren Toten

Durs Grünbein

The Dear Dead

»Stop, wanderer, and read!«, called out the tombstones to the passers-by two thousand years ago. Inscriptions spoke of the pleasures of the deceased, of profession and merit, character and family. The personality lived on in bound speech.

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Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Portuguese rights (Angelus Novus), Norway (Bokvennen), Japan (CHUO University Press)

Erklärte Nacht

Durs Grünbein

Declared Night

Exploring the possibilities individuals have within the limits of their life-times and the confines of the big city as their living space – these have long since been themes that Grünbein addresses.

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Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Italy (Einaudi), Hungary (Jelenkor)

Grauzone morgens

Durs Grünbein

Grey Area in the Mornings

The »silent turmoil« of an elegiac expressionism is what propels Durs Grünbein’s poems forwards, who notes his experience of reality in crass and direct images.

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Italy (Einaudi); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Poesia Hidalgo), Hungary (Jelenkor)

Koloß im Nebel

Durs Grünbein

Colossus in the Fog

Durs Grünbein’s volumes of poetry are known for grasping their subjetcs in larger and larger circles, in their concentric sprawl they seem made for this age of globalisation. His new collection of poetry follows the outline of an exhibition. Works from the last five to eight years are presented in seven sections.

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