Translation

Combining the collections Monster Poems, Morbus and Fashions, Nora Gomringer’s trilogy offers a modern anthropology. Gomringer shines a light on the all-too-human, plays with the superficial and loves the invisible. Accompanied by Reimar Limmer’s illustrations, these poems unpick ideas around the monstrous, the inscribed and gendered body and the face we present to the people around us. Packed with pop culture references and always casting an eye back to where we came from, The Trilogy of Surfaces and Invisibilities is a call for a radical humanism.

Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding trip, an overwhelmed psychologist, a housekeeper with a broken arm, and an ingenious cook; get Lord and Lady McIntosh to try and keep it all together; and top it off with all sorts of animals – soon no one will know exactly what’s going on.

‘A peacock whodunnit meets Monarch of the Glen. Light-hearted and fun, to be enjoyed by the fire, with a whisky, of course. In Annie Rutherford’s translation, it’s hard to imagine it was originally written in German.’ Kari Dickson

This bilingual chapbook offers an introduction to the work of the prize-winning Belarusian poet Volha Hapeyeva.

‘The themes which Volha Hapeyeva deals with are not the easiest: war, death, gender. But she doesn’t make it hard for the reader to follow her lyrical confrontation with these themes. Hapeyeva’s language gains its power from its almost laconic simplicity. Her poetry evokes melody; combativeness exudes from all the text pores of the poems.’ Jury’s statement on selecting Hapeyeva as the Graz City Writer, 2019/20

Experimental yet accessible, Hydra’s Heads is comprised of poems which defy categorisation, and show Nora Gomringer interweaving the best of German page and spoken word poetry to create something entirely her own. These are poems which laugh, howl, stamp their lines. They are candid, wry, compassionate. There are poems about the darker times of Germany’s modern history, reworkings of myths and fairy tales and a 3-page-long ode to sex against a wall.