Suhrkamp | Insel

Home / Heim.Statt
Poems

The new, moving cycle of poems by Esther Kinsky

»When a shoot of the rose of paradise has been grafted onto all roses, all errant wanderers will find their way home.«

Images of flight, dispossession, and injury, spanning millennia, in history and myth: Eurydice, frantically fleeing from a god that is stalking her, fails to notice the serpent and dies from its poisonous bite. Landless cottagers in northern Scotland, relocated to less fertile land or forced to emigrate. A young German nobelwoman, educated and gifted, resists the »given«, the »morals of complaisance« of her social status. A maid in Poland transforms into a bird, escaping poverty and the...

Read more

Images of flight, dispossession, and injury, spanning millennia, in history and myth: Eurydice, frantically fleeing from a god that is stalking her, fails to notice the serpent and dies from its poisonous bite. Landless cottagers in northern Scotland, relocated to less fertile land or forced to emigrate. A young German nobelwoman, educated and gifted, resists the »given«, the »morals of complaisance« of her social status. A maid in Poland transforms into a bird, escaping poverty and the indignities of life. On the northern border of Italy, after being left on their own for months, women refuse to use human language after the return of the men.

Esther Kinsky’s Home is a work cycle made up of seven long, plurivocal poems which, connected by brief, adjoining texts, bring together and crystallise recurring motifs of the violence, injury, and silence related to the overarching theme of flight and refuge. Kinsky finds moving images to illustrate how loss and the desire to start again have always been a component of human existence, providing sources of both hope and trauma.

2025, 155 pages
Service
Cover (Web)Cover (Print)

Persons

Esther Kinsky was born in Engelskirchen in 1956. Her oeuvre, which includes poetry, fiction, essays and translations from the Polish, Russian, and English, has been awarded numerous prestigious awars, including Kleist Prize in 2022. Kinsky’s novel Grove won the Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2018 and the Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis 2018, was shortlisted for the Europese Literatuurprijs 2021, longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021, and the English translation by Caroline Schmidt was nominated for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. An unpublished and anonymously entered extract from her novel Rombo was awarded the newly founded W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis in 2020.
Esther Kinsky was born in Engelskirchen in 1956. Her oeuvre, which includes poetry, fiction, essays and translations from the Polish, Russian, and...

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Seeing Farther
Year of Publication: 2023
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2023

On a journey through the south-east of Hungary, the narrator stops off in an almost completely deserted village on the border to Romania. Resignation and a glorification of the past are the most...

Rights sold to:

USA & Canada (NYRB), UK & Commonwealth (Fitzcarraldo), Spanish world rights (Periférica), Portuguese rights (Elsinore), France (Christian Bourgois), Italy (Iperborea), Netherlands (Pluim), Hungary (Jelenkor)

The Captain and Mimi Catt
Year of Publication: 2022
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2022
So cold! And so much snow! Mimi Catt, a snow-white and very clever cat, would prefer nothing more than to stay in her small, cosy basement flat. Even though a nasty mud-brown pug just did his business right in front of Mimi Catt’s window. And on top of it all, a huge ocean liner is stuck in the frozen canal outside the flat! »How is this possible?« Mimi Catt wonders. But once...
Rombo
Year of Publication: 2022
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2022
In May and September 1976, two severe earthquakes rip through north-eastern Italy, causing severe damage to the landscape and its population. About a thousand people die under the rubble, tens of...
Rights sold to:

USA & Canada (NYRB), UK & Commonwealth (Fitzcarraldo), Spanish world rights (Periférica), Catalan rights (Angle), Portugal (Elsinore), France (Christian Bourgois), Italy (Iperborea), Netherlands (Pluim), Denmark (Atlanten), Norway (Forlaget Press), Finland (Lurra), Poland (Drzazgi), Turkey (Axis)

Slates
Year of Publication: 2020
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2020

Esther Kinsky’s new book is dedicated to slate, the polymorphic, versatile sedimentary rock, and to the Slate Islands, a small archipelago off the West coast of Scotland. For centuries, slate was mined on those islands that are part of the Inner Hebrides and they are lastingly shaped by the intensive industry that was abandoned many decades ago and that has left behind a bizarre landscape of...

Grove
Year of Publication: 2018
Esther KinskyYear of Publication: 2018

Profoundly empathetic, and austere – a minor-key exploration of landscape and land.

Grove is a novel in three parts, each of them concerned with a different...

Rights sold to:

UK & Commonwealth (Fitzcarraldo), USA & Canada (Transit Books), Spanish world rights (Periférica), France (Grasset), Italy (Il Saggiatore), Netherlands (Pluim), Denmark (Atlanten), Finland (Lurra), Greece (Potamos), Ukraine (Knihy XXI)