To refrain from embracing by Monika Rinck and translated by Nicholas Grindell

This is poetry from Germany.

To refrain from embracing by Monika Rinck translated by Nicholas Grindell is published by Burning Deck/Anyart. This is a Book originally written in German. This was published in 2011.0 and has the ISBN of 9.78193619407E12.

To refrain from embracing, by Monika Rinck and translated by Nicholas Grindell from German, brings German poetry into English through Monika Rinck’s refusal of embrace, brilliant social distance, and the comic intelligence of not giving oneself over too easily. 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 embrace, refusal, wit, and the erotic charge of keeping language slightly apart, 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. To refrain from embracing belongs in the translated poetry library because it adds a contemporary German voice of conceptual play and bodily hesitation.

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.