poetry
Edited by Friedmar Apel

480pp

» About the author

A composed tone dominates Ror Wolf’s poems, although they deal with curious events, accidents and erotic confusions. Parts of bodies protrude into rooms, pistols are drawn and travellers fade away mutely into unknown territories. The lightness of the language and its artful comedy are only two aspects of this world, behind whose description the sceptical gaze of the melancholic is always in evidence.

With the inclusion of unpublished early poems this is the first one-volume collection to bring together all of Ror Wolf’s poetry.


»In his prose, his poetry and his word and sound collages Ror Wolf inimitably combines linguistic artistry and grotesque comedy with a terse and compassionate perception of reality and its fundamental constants, fear and hope, pleasure and decay. He is a master of the cryptic and utopian play with the primal matter of poetry.«
Friedrich Hölderlin Award, Jury statement

»What would the world be without Ror Wolf (…) Wolf’s worlds are often as unsettling as those collages Max Ernst assembled from elements at once familiar, arbitrary and terrifying. That not only applies to Wolf’s own collages which resemble them, and which he has been producing for a long time as a relaxation from writing, but also to his texts. Rarely has the puzzling been so entertaining…«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»Sometimes the whole universe seems to have been drawn into the elongations and contractions of a gigantic metabolic system that turns the identifiable fragments of reality upside down. Catastrophes, accidents, sodomy – anything that we perceive as singular and prominent incidents standing out from our everyday life - appear in Wolf's texts in abundance, as though they had been bought by the hundred at the discounter and been dumped from the package to the floor.
A fantastic spectacle! It is exactly this fantastic accumulation of events which makes the texts so exclusive and entrancing. The truth of form manifests itself in immense clusters and their reciprocal relativization. In fact, these accumulations have been dominant for a long time in almost all areas of Western society, publicly and privately: in the supermarkets and in the news, in the disaster statistics and capital markets, even in love and death.«
Die Welt


The Collected Works of Ror Wolf. The New Edition for the New Century

The annotated edition of Ror Wolf not only brings together all previously published books by Ror Wolf, but also work which appeared in out-of-the-way places or was not printed at all. It includes early drafts as well as manuscript versions and for the first time makes accessible a broad selection of essays, reviews, speeches and correspondence. An afterword by the editor describes the genesis and reception of the individual works.

Reviews

»Pure joy. (...) There’s no explanation yet as to why this mixture of ›excitement and scare, lust for realism, importance and concision‹, of eloquence, humour and horror moves and exhilarates readers like it does, what makes for its strong pull. An enigmatic work, yet suitbale for daily use.«
Frankfurter Rundschau (launch of the Collected Works)

»In over forty years, Ror Wolf has created an opus that is singular in its powerful visual intricateness, its wild, chilly humour, and its magical simulation of reality. He is a classic of postmodern literature, he has been for quite a while.«
Süddeutsche Zeitung

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