Julia Trompeter: Within Our Grasp

Julia Trompeter
Within Our Grasp

poetry

ca. 112pp (7,000 words)

Like the objects around us, Julia Trompeter's poems are within our grasp. Even the title of her debut book of poetry manifests a peculiar kind of doubt about the possibility of insight; here a playful, life-affirming, curious and surprisingly comical scepticism is at work. Impressions, imagination and dreams appear on an equal footing with apparently concrete fact in these poems. Trompeter accepts no limits as to the subject matter of her work:
»Smiling dutifully, your toe / sounds me out, nail bed round as the world: / Globules hope for two monoliths / in the north-oriented morning«.

Elsewhere a kiss becomes a phenomenological experiment, bringing the reader closer at a single stroke to what nonetheless remains hidden. Julia Trompeter's poems are about love and landscape, about the life of the everyday and of books – a wealth of poetic riches in a language both fresh and, hovering, somnambulistic.

Reviews

»Trompeter's poetry debut WITHIN OUR GRASP makes us more receptive for the in-between, the not yet, the becoming. (...) A stroke of luck of poetry that is as dynamic as mentally free. With Trompeter we see a tomorrow, a sparkling spot on a poetic horizon.«
ZEIT online

»An incredibly free book – (...) These brimming, self-conscious songs, playing with words easily, cheerfully emotional, certainly live up to their name. ›Totally relaxed‹, they indeed come ›within our grasp‹.«
Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung

»The lyric volume WITHIN OUR GRASP is refreshingly unconstrained in its form and content. (…) To describe it with one of Julia Trompeter's own coinages: it is ›soft like grenades‹.«
literaturhaus.net

»(...) a modern, idiosyncratic lyric volume. (...) Skillfully and confidently Trompeter juggles with terms and ambiguities, switches between concrete and abstract, combines unusual elements, uses anglicisms and metaphors and throws in loads of literary allusions to other works and authors.«
ekz.bibliotheksservice

»Quietly and rhythmically, Trompeters very affecting texts mesmerize the reader.«
Signaturen

»Julia Trompeter intuitively questions the material quality of language.«
SWR

»There is something arcane in her poems, secrets of the world, almost impossible to decode, yet to be experienced in language.«
Rheinische Post

»At times of overwhelming aesthetic, at times full of wit.«
Luxemburger Tageblatt

»The poems of Julia Trompeter are about love and landscape, about daily life (…) – they are of poetical wealth and told with a dreamily floating sound.«
Cölner Literaturblätter

»Julia Trompeter's poems are witty, funny and ambiguous. They entice and seduce.«
Gallus Frei-Tomic, literaturblatt.ch

More titles by Julia Trompeter

Julia Trompeter: The AgentJulia Trompeter: Spring in UtrechtJulia Trompeter: Scattered Heart