Yevgeniy Breyger is one of the most outstanding young voices in German-language poetry of the new century. Jan Kuhlbrodt once aptly described Breyger as a poet not only "knowing all the tricks of the rhythmical trade," but whose poems recall "a kabbalistic incantation," a "mysticism that turns into the absurd, yet also emerges from it once more." Breyger allows himself to revive the old idea of the magic of language without buying into its pathos; he allows himself to probe language once more for all its potential; the result is an astounding lyric debut.
In fugitive moons, a central motif of German Romanticism - the moon - is manipulated. The moon appears in the plural, a team in flight. From whom is one fleeing? Who no longer wishes to remain where they once were? Instead of running yearningly into open arms, one takes to one's heels and seeks distance; perhaps, then, not only a central motif of Romanticism, but a central feeling of a generation that spent its childhood in the 1990s and its youth in the 2000s in Europe. Everything can be desired except desire itself.
And with that, this motif - so often a dumping ground in the history of German-language literature - is still not exhausted. For the moon is also one of the many rulers of the tides; what it leaves behind, or what it reveals with the move-ments of the sea, showing what it has hidden in its belly, can only be presented through a kind of linguistic magic. In this way, all manner of debris washes ashore as these poems traverse the world like Rimbaud's legendary bateau ivre; monstrous beings appear, the monstrous within the everyday appears. Visible, for instance, are the "sand families" that give their names to cycles, the "plant families"; visible, too, that the intensely yearning, post-Romantic poet Trakl "was afraid of staplers, cockroaches, children and amphorae."
Breyger, Yevgeniy: - Yevgeniy Breyger was born in 1989 in Kharkiv, studied at the literary institutes in Hildesheim and Leipzig, and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He works as a translator, editor, curator, and editor. His most recent collections of poems are hallo niemand (2026, Suhrkamp Verlag) and Frieden ohne Krieg (2023, kookbooks). He has received numerous accolades, including the Christine Levant Prize and the Klopstock Prize for New Literature. Breyger lives in Vienna, where he teaches at the Institute of Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts. Fugitive Moons was his first collection, and this is the first book-length translation of his work in English.
Kappe, Alexander: - Alexander Kappe is an author, translator, literary scholar, and mediator of literature. He studied philosophy, comparative literature, and creative writing in Berlin and Leipzig, and completed his doctorate in Berlin and Oxford. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where he works on the cultural significance of confession. His poetry debut 'nachreden auf dunkelengel' appeared in 2023 with gutleut. His second poetry collection 'kleiner mann triptychon' will be published in 2026 by Gans. He has been nominated for various literary prizes and has co-edited anthologies and journals. In 2025, the anthology 'The Opposite of Seduction: German-language Poetry Since 2000' was published by Shearsman Books, for which he also contributed translations. Since 2023, he has overseen German editions of the poetry of U.S. author Keith Waldrop (his most recently translations being 'the locality principle', gutleut 2023, and 'The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon with Sample Poems', gutleut 2025).
