




Wallless Space
Wallless Space
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Wallless Space [Wandloser Raum] is a translation of German poet Ernst Meister's final collection and the last of the informal trilogy which also includes In Time's Rift (Wave Books, 2012) and Of Entirety Say the Sentence (Wave Books, 2015). Meister's poems are brief but dense, intense but playful; obsessed with mortality and the intersections of the everyday and the infinite. Bilingual (German/English) edition.
Shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry by the American Literary Translators Association
Listed in the top translations of 2014 by Three Percent
Check out pictures and notes from Graham Foust's visit to the Ernst Meister archives: Part 1 and Part 2. -
Each of Meister’s poems is small, hard, pointing both somewhere and nowhere… his lines, in their brevity, can be both elegant and unsettling, evocative of abstract questions about the nature of space and how thought can occupy it… His paradoxes sit there and expand, as do many poems from this collection—lean, dense, kinetic, asking about the misty whole of being.
Noah Dow, The Paris ReviewOften in mid-riddle, in recitation, in rending transformation, Meister’s poems perform magnitudes on a small scale.
Douglas Piccinnini, The Volta
Like his subject matter Meister's writing is ominous, intangible and inescapable.
Publishers WeeklyThe earnestness and aplomb of Meister’s poems—which might also pass muster as a philosophical tract—create a space that allows for meditation on mortality and the eternities that bookend all existence.
Christopher Shannon, Words Without Borders
The poems in Wallless Space are the kind that call you back and make you appreciate them anew—they demand that you pause and engage philosophically, aesthetically, spiritually.
Rebecca Wadlinger, The Rumpus...Wallless Space is a brooding but never insular meditation on mortality, written by a deeply philosophical yet deeply humane poet. Meister’s poems are tersely epigrammatic, but also haunted and quirky, and above all fearless in their reckonings with our transience.
David Wojahn, On the Seawall
...Vivid language animates the fabric of daily life, and even the simplest image becomes startling.
Erica Mena, ATLA
Publication Date: September 2, 2014
ISBN# 9781933517940 (5.5x9 144pp, paperback)
ISBN# 9781933517957 (5.5x9 144pp, limited edition hardcover)
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