Occupied City by Oscar Jespers, Paul van Ostaijen and translated by David Colmer

This is poetry from Belgium.

Occupied City by Oscar Jespers, Paul van Ostaijen translated by David Colmer is published by Smokestack Books. This is a Book originally written in Dutch. This was published in 2017.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780993454714E12.

Occupied City is a Dutch-language Belgian modernist poetry work, translated by David Colmer and published by Smokestack Books in 2017. It is a Dutch-language Belgian modernist work by Paul van Ostaijen with Oscar Jespers, translated by David Colmer, that brings city, occupation, and visual form together. It should be read as more than a conventional poetry collection: a designed urban artifact where typography, history, war, and sound collide. I would not approach it as a book that needs to be solved before it can begin working. Start with the title, the pressure of the translated line, and the feeling of a voice making room for itself in English. The value here is not just metadata or representation. It is the chance to let a particular book create its own weather, its own difficulty, and its own way of asking the reader to listen.

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.