Father’s on the Phone with the Flies by Herta Müller and translated by Thomas Cooper

This is poetry from Romania.

Father’s on the Phone with the Flies by Herta Müller translated by Thomas Cooper is published by Seagull Books, Limited. This is a Book originally written in German. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780857424723E12.

Father’s on the Phone with the Flies, by Herta Müller and translated by Thomas Cooper from German, brings Romanian German-language poetry into English through Herta Müller’s flies, fathers, dictatorship, and the absurd collage logic of memory under surveillance. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem begins making its own weather. I would read it for flies, father, collage, and the unnerving humor that appears when terror invades domestic language, not as a fixed lesson about a nation, period, or school. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Father’s on the Phone with the Flies belongs in the translated poetry library because it brings Romanian German-language poetry into the library through compression, cut-up, and menace.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.