HAUS FÜR POESIE

With Yevgeniy Breyger, Olvido García Valdés, Maricela Guerrero, Monika Herceg, Sasja Janssen, Helen Mort, Stella Nyanzi, Rachel Zucker

Introduced by Anna Eble, Logan February, Valeria Gordeev, Ana Rocío Jouli, Felipe Sáez Riquelme, Ivana Sajko, Jordan Lee Schnee, Jan Wagner

Few German-language poets have reached the heights of what poetry can be and do today as quickly as Yevgeniy Breyger (born 1989 in Kharkiv). What’s truly astonishing, however, is what came later: once bitter reality—the escalation of Russia’s war of aggression in spring 2022—hit the world and his work, Breyger turned toward a far more direct poetic voice, abandoning all his sophisticated artistic means. His collection Frieden ohne Krieg (Peace Without War, kookbooks 2024) caused a sensation. The poem (indistinctive chatter) the year’s chatter, which Breyger will present, was written especially for this year’s poesiefestival.

Olvido García Valdés (born 1950 in Austurias, Spain) is regarded as one of the most important representatives of contemporary Spanish poety. Jagd bei Nacht (roughly Night Hunt, KLAK Verlag 2023), which was originally published in Spanish in 1997, is the first collection to be translated into German. Her poems testify to an intense sensitivity to the seemingly obvious, which transcends to the essential in a few precise lines: “to write fear is to write / slowly, with small / print and separate lines.”

In the poems of Maricela Guerrero (born 1977 in Mexico City) cells and wolves dream, and date palms rehearse uprisings. Sometimes her texts are lullabies under the lens of a microscope, others they’re walks though 3D maps of forests at a scale of 1:1. But they always aim to “mitigate” and “shake” the empire’s language encoded in the unfamiliar, mineral language in statistics. In German, her texts have been published in the bilingual edition El sueño de toda célula/Wovon jede Zelle träumt (roughly, What Every Cell Dreams, Aphaia Verlag 2021).

Monika Herceg (born 1990 in Sisak, Croatia) followed her internationally acclaimed debut Početne koordinate (2018, roughly Initial Coordinates), a cycle about her childhood during the Yugoslavian Wars, with two further volumes that increasingly mark her as a feminist poet. In Jagdverbot (Hunting Ban, eta Verlag 2023), the German translation of her second collection, she develops a new mythology of female strength through a densely poetic chronology of emancipation: “you are a self-confident poet / the paths of comets break on your finger.”

Sasja Janssen’s (born 1968 in Venlo, Netherlands) most recent poetry collections Virgula and Mijn vader zegt entropie mijn moeder logica (Querido 2021 and 2024) both received the Awater Poetry Prize. In Virgula, the lyrical subject addresses the comma, the “virgula” in Latin, as muse and companion. Driven by the comma, Janssen’s poems propel forward, sentence by sentence, filling an inner emptiness—though only able to postpone the inevitable end: “I long for a full stop, but my Virgulas are wary / of employing them.”

Helen Mort (born 1985 in Sheffield, UK) is one of the most versatile and accomplished poets of her generation. She has published poetry, prose, and non-fiction on a variety of topics, ranging from greyhounds, running, female climbers, British pubs, and motherhood. Her most recent book The Illustrated Woman (Chatto & Windus 2022) is a striking collection about (tattooed) female bodies and how they create themselves in opposition to external expectations. “It is as if / she wanted to leave no room / for anything to touch her.”

Stella Nyanzi (born 1974 in Jinja, Uganda) is a poet, feminist activist, and medical anthropologist. In her poems, she sharply criticizes the human rights violations committed under dictator Yoweri Museveni, something which has led to her being imprisoned several times in Uganda. She has lived in exile in Munich since 2022. Her protest form of “radical rudeness” permeates her poetry, which have been published in the collection under the title Im Mundexil (Exiled for my mouth, Verlag Das Wunderhorn 2025): “I am coming back home / To sodomise Yoweri / With my sharpened pencil.”

Rachel Zucker (born 1971 in New York City, USA) writes about her multiple roles as author, lecturer, and mother from an autofictional perspective in her essays and poems—most recently in SoundMachine and The Poetics of Wrongness (Wave Books 2019 and 2023). Her work is characterized by a poetics of interruption, vulnerability, and immediacy, while navigating the ethical balancing act of writing about one’s own life and surroundings. “How long does it take to know somthing [sic] is amiss when everything is.”

Kindly supported by: Instituto Cervantes Berlin, Nederlands Letterenfonds, Traduki
The event will be held at Großes Parkett of Akademie der Künste