HAUS FÜR POESIE

Monika Herceg (born 1990 in Sisak, Croatia) made her debut in 2018 with the volume Početne koordinate (SKUD Ivan Goran Kovačić), the English translation of which, Initial Coordinates (Sandorf Passage 2022) by Marina Veverec, gained international recognition and several awards. The four-part cycle—divided into Origin, Flight, Exile, and Return—recounts a childhood in a Croatian village in the 90s during the Yugoslavian Wars. She writes, “sharply and abruptly like wounding / begins the final hunt / death meeting us in person / before the doors close.” The unsettling tonality that creates a constant sense of threat, permeates the collection, which also includes echoes of Slavic mythology and oral tradition. Family life is depicted as impoverished and violent, the world outside the village seems to be a threat, and death is always around the corner: “the death we feed to others / sometimes by chance / comes back into ourselves.”

“I wanted a ghost of collectivity to emerge from the poems,” suggests Kim Hyesoon (born 1955 in Uljin, Kyŏngsangbuk-do, South Korea) in an interview included in her book Autobiography of Death (Munhaksilheomsil, 2016), which was published this year by S. Fischer Verlag in a German translation by Uljana Wolf and Sool Park. The 49 poems of the volume, which represent that 49 days a spirit wanders between death and reincarnation according to Buddhist tradition, are cryptic poems, fully aware of “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” The same is true of the most recent volume, Phantom Pain Wings (New Directions 2023), published in an English translation by Don Mee Choi. In this book, the figure of a bird-man blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, the physical and the spiritual. Hyesoon: “Bird is a mechanism that subjectifies the gaps. Bird is a subject in process, making me give birth to the dead.”

The poems in Sasja Janssen’s (born 1968 in Venlo, Netherlands) penultimate volume Virgula (Querido 2021), which won the Awater Poetry Prize and the Johan Polak Poetry Prize, are dedicated to the comma—in Latin, virgula—which is invoked as a muse or friend: “don’t entreat me, I’m writing to you in all earnestness, Virgula Virgula.” In the letters to Virgula, events from the past come to the surface but are never fully recounted—sexual abuse, failed love affairs, a mastectomy. It is the comma that holds the lyrical subject together. It is a restless force, through which life and the poems do not give in to stagnation despite it all, and which, sentence by sentence, fills the emptiness the lyrical subject feels: “I allow myself to be chased along / by the commas, my she-devils.” And yet, the comma’s impact and the meaning of the events only unfold against the inevitable end that it can only postpone.

“These poems sing to and for the ghosts of identity, history and culture,” writes Terrance Hayes in his foreword to Diana Khoi Nguyen’s (born in Los Angeles) debut collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), which was nominated for the National Book Award. In this volume, and even more so in the follow-up collection Root Fractures (Scriber 2024), Nguyen places her brother’s suicide within the continuum of violence and trauma marking her family’s history. Nguyen’s parents, who were both born in Vietnam during the war, fled to the USA once it ended. “Let me tell you a story about refugees. A mother and her dead son sit in the back seat of his car.” The absence of the brother permeates the poems: family photographs from which he cut himself out two years before his death become the negative space in and around which Nguyen builds her poems, as if trying to fill and enclose this void. “There is a house in me. It is empty. I empty it. / Negative space: the only native emptiness there is.”

Moderation: Irina Bondas

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

Kindly supported by: Nederlands Letterenfonds, Traduki and Lyrik-Empfehlungen 2025. Lyrik-Empfehlungen is a project by Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Stiftung Lyrik Kabinett, Haus für Poesie, Deutscher Bibliotheksverband and Deutscher Literaturfonds.

The event takes place at silent green's Kuppelhalle.