6/13/25
Fri,
19:30

An Evening with Helen Mort, Daniela Seel & Rachel Zucker
We are alone we are never alone we are always

Reading
Talk
Poesiefestival Berlin 2025
silent green
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(c) Emma Ledwith
(c) Dirk Skiba
(c) Rachel Zucker

This evening brings together three poets whose writing engages with vulnerability, motherhood, mortality, and female writing.

“I do not think I long / to be natural, pure like the floors of the airports,” writes Helen Mort (born 1985 in Sheffield, UK) in her third volume of poems, entitled The Illustrated Woman (Chatto & Windus 2022). The poems in this collection offer a multifaceted exploration of the female body—particularly, as the title ambiguously hints at, the tattooed female body—as well as the external perceptions and “male gazes” that seek to define it. There are poems about pregnancy and motherhood, about the aging body of one’s own mother, and about deep-fake pornography, which Mort was a victim of some years ago. Some poems are dedicated to real women, such as the most photographed tattooed woman of the twentieth century, Betty Broadbent, and the porn actress August Ames, who took her own life in 2017. The tattooed body, which is repeatedly depicted, becomes an assertion of the autonomous female self that reclaims the authority to define her own body and protects it from external intrusions: “You might say she designed herself.”

“To take Eve seriously” is the premise of the long poem Nach Eden (Suhrkamp Verlag 2024, After Eden), the fourth collection by poet and kookbooks publisher Daniela Seel (born 1974 in Frankfurt am Main). Eve’s exodus from paradise, the enclosed Garden of Eden, is read here as an act of self-empowerment, as a conscious decision in favor of knowledge and vulnerability, of giving birth and death—and of the responsibility that comes with it. “to decide to die, to leave, into the expanses, / with no home, to trust oneself” also means that destruction and violence are possible. References are made to witch-burning and Nazi euthanasia, as well as to stillbirth. “The garden’s order fails. A garden divides, into herb / and weeds, useful plants and ornamental plants, beneficial being and harmful being.” The poem counters this with a poetic language of “condensed, composed time” that never resorts to simple dichotomies, and consciously decides against cruelty though capable of it. “If I could unlearn my cruelty, / by stepping into death, not condemned, / but gifted in dying.”

Rachel Zucker (born 1971 in New York City, USA) dedicates herself to female writing and writing as a mother in her essays and poems—such as the collections, SoundMachine (Wave Books 2019) and Museum of Accidents (Wave Books 2009)—often from an autofictional perspective: “But it felt undoable. This lucky life / every day, every day. every. day.” Zucker integrates the state of constant interruption, the unfinished and unpolished, where she finds herself between family life and teaching, into her poetics. “A poet is one who feels wrong in a wrong world and is willing to speak even when doing so proves her wrong, ugly, broken, and complicit,” she writes in her most recent collection of essays The Poetics of Wrongness (Wave Books 2023). There, she also reflects on the consequences of radically confessional writing, which includes real loved ones and breaches one’s own privacy.

Moderation: Lea Schneider

The event will be interpreted into German and English. Kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen

The event will take place at Kuppelhalle.