this porous fabric – selected poems

Ulrike Draesner is recognized as one of Germany’s most important living poets and fiction writers. She has published eight volumes of poetry, seven novels, and three books of short stories. She has translated William Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Louise Glück, among others. She has received many literary awards, including the Nicolas Born Prize (2016), the Gertrud Kolmar Prize (2019), and the GEDOK-Prize (2020). Draesner lives in Berlin and Leipzig, where she is director of the Institute for German Literature and holds a professorship in creative writing.

From her publisher’s announcement of “this porous fabric”: “Her writing favors an exchange with the reader that explores unfamiliar modes of encountering the world to form the sociable space of a poem. Her work is charged with a delicious, inquisitive restlessness.”

I write in order to make audible, to translate into language, that which is usually left unspoken, that which seems unspeakable.

– Ulrike Draesner –