Overview

My German Dictionary, which won the fourteenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, is a guide to an idiosyncratic interior country, a map of the experience of absorbing and being absorbed by Central European language, culture, aesthetics, and history. It is a catalogue of small beloved things inflected by massive horrors. The poems are home to and haunted by Franz Marc’s horses, ETA Hoffmann’s tales, the Great War, Bertolt Brecht, Rosa Luxemburg, enchanted bears, Weimar Berlin, and vanished relatives, along with an entire alphabet of mishearings, mnemonics, and valentines for the German language. These are the poems of an historian wrestling with mastery of the unmasterable, the histories in miniature of a poet.

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9781904130970

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Reviews

A book of startling, radiant images that ferry the poems to their destinations of discovery and illumination. ... [T]hese are wise and brave poems, from a wise and brave hand, A to Z. They go to the heart of the heart of the matter, whatever it is, and wherever it is. Like sharp little picks, they de-ice and reveal. ... [A] beautiful and--it seems to me--necessary book. -- from Charles Wright's foreword Abundant imagination, as heartbreaking and wild as folk tales. Informed historical understanding. Melody in the sentences and lines. Each of these is a rare poetic gift, and all three combined animate Katherine Hollander's My German Dictionary. These poems with their lexicon of grief confront the terrors of history in a way that is brooding, clear-eyed, and blessedly inventive. -- Robert Pinsky

Author Information

Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Born in Boston, she was educated at Marlboro College and Boston University, where she earned an MA in poetry and a PhD in history. Her poems, criticism, and scholarly work have appeared in Literary Imagination, Slate, Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, The Brecht Yearbook, New German Critique, and elsewhere. She has taught European history at Simmons College, the University of Hartford, and Colby College, creative writing at Boston University, and serves as a Reader for Sugar House Review. Alongside writing poems, she is at work on a historical monograph about a community of German-speaking intellectuals in exile, and translating the childhood memoirs of Margarete Steffin.

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