Mondsee Poetry Prize

Nadja Küchenmeister – All the Lights

poetry

104pp

» About the author

»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…

Reviews

»Her poems are characterized by their sensitive, poetic perception of everyday life, and written in a song-like tone. Ahe accurately captures feelings of dismissal, incomprehension and rejection, and we hear the voice of nature speak through atmospheric images.«
Mondsee Poetry Prize, Jury Statement

»Nadja Küchenmeister’s first book of poetry shows a a unique lyrical voice that sounds smooth and calm, even though it seems to come straight out of purgatory, between love and death. Not since Ingeborg Bachmann has the lyrical You or I or the reader been addressed as intensely.«
Literarische Welt

»In a kind and tender way, these poems have faith in things, sounds and smells. With a particular sensuality and finely drawn outlines that make resonance for the sound of every single word, the author takes us to the interiors of childhood and youth. (...) Nadja Küchenmeister is endowed with laconism, humour and wit. The beauty of her love poems is dazzling«
Lutz Seiler, Literature Award of Brandenburg