This Porous Fabric

Ulrike Draesner is recognised as one of Germany's most important living poets, as well as being an original and daring writer of fiction. Her poetic language, recorded where breath and script meet, can unsettle conventional reading modalities: its orthography refuses to capitalize; its punctuation- if the stops and starts may be called that - is rarely executed by comma or period; its sequentialities, shunning the comfort of bespoke narrative, undermining the reliability of marching lines and subaltern clauses, are born at the intersection of worldly impulse and bodily pulse, vulnerable to the loops of memory. Her writing favours an exchange with the reader that explores unfamiliar modes of encountering the world to form the sociable space of a poem. Her work is charged with a delicious, inquisitive restlessness. Visually acute, her poems are keen to discover, reflect on and body forth complex blendings of thought, sound, smell and image, delivering a revealing diffraction to the reader's ear.