Description

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A collection of vital, melancholic, elemental, and vibrantly contemporary poems.

In the beginning, was the light, or was it the Lumières? In Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest volume of poetry, it is only a leap from the creation of the world to the symphony of the Berlin metropolis. And there is a question holding out off the coast of Lampedusa: Can shining sheep be used as night storage for the dark hours, when we are overwhelmed with fears of God, of a gym teacher with a whistle, of mothers with eyes as black as coal? In devastating sequences, Sandig charts the reality of an abused child, victims of contemporary war, or a fourteenth-century Madonna. Full of humor, musicality, lightness, and rage, Shining Sheep is not just visual poetry—it has loops in your ear and filmic explosions of imagery for all your senses.

About the Author

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Born in former East Germany in 1979, Ulrike Almut Sandig has written two books of short stories, and four volumes of poetry as well as a novel. In 2021 she was invited to give the prestigious Thomas-Kling Poetics Lectures.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator, and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford, where she works on modern poetry. For Seagull Books, she has translated works by Durs Grünbein, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Michael Krüger.