• ISBN13: 9781803091853
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: General Books
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publisher Imprint: Seagull Books
• Publication Date: December 10, 2023
• Pages: 80
• Original Price: INR 499.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 90 grams

Ulrike Almut Sandig’s second volume of poems to be translated into English is a journey through a world that is imaginary yet entirely recognizable. Precise observation of the concrete is mixed with playful humor, inspired musicality, and an anxious reckoning with undercurrents of violence. Borrowing from the Brothers Grimm, the collection explores the darker side of their fairy tales as a backdrop for very contemporary concerns: Migration, war, the rise of the new right, ecological threat, information overload, and political apathy. At the same time, Sandig plays with the German meaning of the word “Grimm”: rage. That emotion permeates the collection as a reaction to the darkness in the collective German consciousness. Yet the book is also animated by the passionate, expansive empathy—and reminds us what it is to be human. Always inventive, Sandig teases us here with multiple versions of the self, and multiple voices all in search of the origins of poetry in hidden places: in the silence before language, in the wings, in the field of rapeseed deep in the snow.

Born in former East Germany in 1979, Ulrike Almut Sandig has written two books of short stories, and four volumes of poetry as well as a novel. In 2021 she was invited to give the prestigious Thomas-Kling Poetics Lectures. Karen Leeder is a writer, critic and prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature including work by Durs Grünbein, Volker Braun, Michael Krüger, Evelyn Schlag and Raoul Schrott.