Nadja Küchenmeister – All the Lights

poetry, new title

104pp

»Nadja Küchenmeister’s language is beautiful and as if brand-new. She blends emotions and objects into a grand, gentle melody« – that’s how the critic Ulrich Greiner, writing in the renowned Frankfurter Anthologie, opened the gates wide to the literary future of Nadja Küchenmeister. Now, with ALLE LICHTER she presents her first, melodious, volume of poetry.

ALLE LICHTER displays the art of Nadja Küchenmeister, not least the wonderful scenic quality of her poetry, always finely balanced on the border between lyric and narrative. It is a book of very modern poems, which never deny their roots in the great tradition of lyrical speaking and writing, a book entirely of today, which points to what is still to come.

phoenix

dawn is breaking, your shyness
and those photos re-emerge, which in the evening I laid
on the chest of drawers. there again: the back of your neck, my dear

your hands and also the blue vein which as always
branches at your wrist and since all pictures still
sleep in you and your breathing quietly ebbs in the morning

as if there were peace in you, peace… lost to the world
I will consume your silence as a flame consumes the air
so that transformed it circulates evermore in my lungs…

About the author

Nadja Küchenmeister was born in 1981 in Berlin where she also lives. She studied German and sociology in Berlin and was then a student at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut in Leipzig. Her poems have been published in many periodicals and anthologies. She works for radio stations, also writing plays for broadcast, and was awarded the Berliner Senatsstipendium as well as the Förderstipendium der Kulturstiftung Sachsen and the Hermann-Lenz-Stipendium. ALLE LICHTER is her first book.