That Is the Case Here

In 2020 Elke Erb’s poetic and essayistic work entered its fifth decade. What started in 1975 with the volume Gutachten continues to this day: her most recent volume, published in 2019, is entitled Gedichtverdacht. Between those years lie more than fifteen publications in which Elke Erb realised not only new ways of writing but also new genres, such as the essayistic long poem, poetic self-reference, the prose poem and all fractals of commentary. »I studied and invalidated the tendencies of linear writing to divide according to hierarchies […], so that previously silent(-dark) connections appeared in the mirror of language and new connections (realisations, aspects, insights, overviews) were continuously formed from them,« is how Elke Erb described her method in 1988.

Steffen Popp and Monika Rinck have compiled a selection from this unique and independent œuvre that is far from being completed – beginning with the early works and including Erb’s most recent poems, which are some of the most vibrant and innovative that contemporary German-language poetry has to offer.

»The poems from more than fifty years of writing seem as though they were new.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»It was a big year for female poets and this is the best possible start for discovering the Büchner Prize laureate’s wide ranging work« Richard Kämmerlings, DIE WELT

»What has made this œuvre influential and is going to continue to make it so is the meticulous, highly deliberate work on language that it accomplishes and performs.« Eberhard Geisler, Frankfurter Rundschau

»conscious of form and bursting form wide open, sage and quizzical.« Cornelia Geißler, Berliner Zeitung

»The smartly edited volume published by Suhrkamp Verlag now honours the rich œuvre of a poet who never wanted to create her own tradition. Her writing should rather be understood as a call to poetic self-empowerment, as a rejection of the lowest common denominator ...« Carsten Otte, SWR

»... [a] triumph, no more, no less« Jonis Hartmann, Fixpoetry