Nadja Küchenmeister: All the Lights

Mondsee Poetry Prize
Ulla Hahn Prize
Stahl Literature Prize

Nadja Küchenmeister
All the Lights

poetry

104pp (7,620 words)

»Nadja Küchenmeister’s language is beautiful and as if brand-new. She blends emotions and objects into a grand, gentle melody« – that’s how the critic Ulrich Greiner, writing in the renowned Frankfurter Anthologie, opened the gates wide to the literary future of Nadja Küchenmeister. Now, with ALLE LICHTER she presents her first, melodious, volume of poetry.

ALLE LICHTER displays the art of Nadja Küchenmeister, not least the wonderful scenic quality of her poetry, always finely balanced on the border between lyric and narrative. It is a book of very modern poems, which never deny their roots in the great tradition of lyrical speaking and writing, a book entirely of today, which points to what is still to come.


dust

once the door is shut, even the dogs in their
kennels are hushed. air traffic ceases, no
mower, no ticking alarm clock, no intrusion. just

the curtain seam that drags along the floor. a shaft of light
that strikes my eye. a sense of fever. timber creaking softly.
just a wasp that bounces off the window. the sway of firs

outside. and in my room, beneath my bed, where someone
lurks with blunted blade, motes are trembling. dust.
dust. i hear the wasp that is above me. a clatter of

plates from the kitchen, a clink of glasses, now cutlery:
who, if i cried out, would hear me, once the animal film
on channel three and all that talk are underway

and none of it addressed to me, trapped in boundless
afternoon light. dust. dust. am i the insect, weary beyond
measure, this is the bed my mother lay in as a child.



>> The three-lingual edition UNDER THE JUNIPER TREE (a selection of poems from UNTER DEM WACHOLDER and ALLE LICHTER) is now available from Coeiscéim Publishers in Ireland.

Rights sold

Ireland (English, Irish) – Coiscéim (poetry selection)

» Contact:

Reviews

»Her poems are characterized by their sensitive, poetic perception of everyday life, and written in a song-like tone. She accurately captures feelings of dismissal, incomprehension and rejection, and we hear the voice of nature speak through atmospheric images.«
Jury, Mondsee Poetry Award

»In the interplay of modernity and tradition Nadja Küchenmeister finds her very own language, awakening the yearning for the future: Her poems are love poems addressed to life.«
Jury, Ulla Hahn Prize

»Nadja Küchenmeister’s first book of poetry shows a a unique lyrical voice that sounds smooth and calm, even though it seems to come straight out of purgatory, between love and death. Not since Ingeborg Bachmann has the lyrical You or I or the reader been addressed as intensely.«
DIE WELT

»Nadja Küchenmeister’s intonation sounds like an evergreen in the readers’ ears, even though it comes along as unspectacular as possible and should rather be hummed than loudly sung or whistled.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»In a kind and tender way, these poems have faith in things, sounds and smells. With a particular sensuality and finely drawn outlines that make resonance for the sound of every single word, the author takes us to the interiors of childhood and youth. (...) Nadja Küchenmeister is endowed with laconism, humour and wit. The beauty of her love poems is dazzling.«
Lutz Seiler, Literature Award of Brandenburg

»An incantation of lost or endangered poetic expressions and thus of an intellectual habitat as well.«
rp-online

More titles by Nadja Küchenmeister

Nadja Küchenmeister: Under the Juniper TreeNadja Küchenmeister: In the Glass Mountain