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Beloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life. The poems of Max Sessner are like compact, musical fairytales. They delight us and frighten us. They touch us with their ghostly, melancholy fingertips and lead us onward.
Dreamlike is a place to begin, one of many inadequate ways I might speak of the poems of Max Sessner. Liquid is better, as his poems move like water and surprise me by revealing spaces between objects and people, between moods and moments that I didn’t know existed. If this book were a house, it’d be on the edge of town and have a tree growing through its roof; a river, it’d know your name but never quite make it to the sea; a photo, the person you miss most would be in it but turned around and looking the other way. In searching for passages to quote that would give you a sense of the imagination and vitality of Sessner’s work, its strangely touching warmth, I found it impossible to excise a portion of a poem without including the whole. Lifelike, then, is what I’ll end with, or better yet, alive.—Bob Hicok, author of Sex & Love
In Francesca Bell’s nimble and swift translations, Max Sessner’s poems come across from German into English with a deft sureness and dramatic delicacy. The wry, sometimes ironic, voice and point of view of these poems is also probing of the shadow mysteries that animate our everyday lives. Silence, loneliness, unsettled companionship, chaste assertion, and everywhere a sense of shifting depths—Sessner’s poems observe what we miss, and ask us to look again. They are quietly confident about what they know, and what they offer is the kind of value we find only in real poems. I’m grateful to have them.—Joshua Weiner, author of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish
Translator Bell offers a long-overdue introduction of German poet Sessner to English-speaking readers. —Kirkus
"Whoever Drowned Here offers a representative body of the work of an important German poet, a poet who risks (literary) obscurity by refusing to be obscure, by writing for the Everyperson in all of us. And we can thank Francesca Bell for offering English-speaking readers the opportunity to ponder and enjoy a writer who plumbs the depths of everyday life." —Lee Rossi, RHINO Poetry