just sitting around here GRUESOMELY now
English world rights (Seagull), France (Atelier de l'Agneau), Denmark (Palomar)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Bulgaria (Ergo)
Strictly composed in form and language while luxuriantly proliferated in daydreams and nightmares, just sitting around here GRUESOMELY now is a significant volume in the radical late work of the great Viennese poet.
»The perfection of the life or the perfection of the work: these are the options Yeats set before his fellow poets. It was, he knew, an impossible choice. A life perfected one day disappears, unrecorded. A work can survive but only if one sacrifices one’s life to perfecting it. It is a circle that cannot be squared. Few writers have had the audacity to even attempt it. One of them, the Austrian experimental poet Friederike Mayröcker, is currently in the seventh decade of a career devoted to erasing the distinction between life and work.« Ryan Ruby, Poetry Foundation
»Two of the most frequently used words when attempting to describe [the reading] experience seem to be ›hallucinatory‹ and ›magical‹. These are not adjectives that come easily to modern and post-modern critics but they are accurate descriptions of the almost physical effect brought about by immersing oneself in the waterfall-like bombardment of [Mayröcker’s] poetry. The range of her poems, and the baroque nature of her imagery, is dizzying: we are taken, often within the space of a line or two, from surrealist fantasy to detailed naturalistic observation, from a reminder to see the oculist to heartfelt elegy.« Jeremy Over, New Books in German
»Mayröcker’s work is a kind of continuous torrent of freely associative, passionate language in the service of private obsessions.« Peter Sirr, Poetry Ireland Review
»Tumult, ferocity, flow, exaltation, immersion: Friederike Mayröcker, among the world’s greatest living writers, reinterprets literary vocation as total theater. Swimming through the language-tide, she cuts syntax into new folds and undulations. Responding to her gestural commands, words form constellations, clusters, diaristic strings of inference.« Wayne Koestenbaum
Persons
Friederike Mayröcker
Friederike Mayröcker was born in 1924 in Vienna, where she died in 2021. From 1946 to 1969 she taught English at various secondary schools in Vienna. Her first literary works date back to 1939. She began publishing poems in journals in 1946, her first book was published in 1956. She wrote poetry, prose, plays, radio plays and children's books and was honoured with numerous distinguished national and international literary awards.
Friederike Mayröcker was born in 1924 in Vienna, where she died in 2021. From 1946 to 1969 she taught English at various secondary schools in...
OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Collected Poems

Airy-Fairy
The collection shares its title with the brief text that closes out the book. In comic artist Nicolas Mahler’s...

as mornings and mossgreen I. Step to the window
»Esteemed listeners, do not try to lift the secret of this text«, orders Friederike Mayröcker in her new work of prose – but even its title leaves an infallible...

Jimi
»Jimi the Polar Bear was lying in the arms of the sleeping child, his paws crossed. It was 1 very young polar pear the size of a puppy and he hardly dared to breathe so as not to wake the child. The child was dreaming that Jimi was lying in its arms and told him 1 story.«
Thus begins the short poetic story of Jimi the Polar Bear and the child Emma, told by the great Austrian poet...

Pathos and Swallow
English world rights (Seagull), Denmark (Arena), Sweden (Ellerstöms)

fleurs
fleurs – the flowers, the flower petals, they give this book its title, make us think of spring, of mild air and gently flowing ribbons. But if you let yourself be lured onto that...
English world rights (Seagull)

cahier
Friederike Mayröcker doesn’t have time. Neither for résumé and memory, nor for extensive observations and reasoning and certainly not for storytelling. She doesn’t even have time for life itself...
English world rights (Seagull)

études
Études is what Friederike Mayröcker calls her prose poetry and lyrical prose pieces, studies then, or »shreddings«, as she says, splintering, brittle and highly concentrated; the language...
English world rights (Seagull)

Scardanelli
USA (The Song Cave), Spain (Ediciones de Aqui), France (Atelier de l'Agneau)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Sweden (Ellerströms), Hungary (Pluralica)

And I Shook Myself a Beloved
English world rights (A Public Space), Czech Republic (Dybbuk)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Sweden (Ellerströms)

brütt
»brütt«. To Friederike Mayröcker a symbol of pain and hardship, of the cold and of grief, were it not for the »sighing gardens« that lend a soft counterbalance to the stirrings of love...
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Northwestern UP), France (Atelier de l'Agneau)

The Heart-Wrenching Nature of Things
France (Atelier de l’Agneau)