HAUS FÜR POESIE

In Kerstin Preiwuß’s new poetry collection Rodeo, her fifth to date, published simultaneously with the novel wir alle (both Berlin Verlag, 2026), the central figure is Kay, a gender-fluid, cold-blooded shape-shifter. The book unfolds both in primordial times and in the immediate present. Together with Kay, readers traverse decades, centuries, and millennia, embarking on a literally wild ride through time.

Kay functions as a kind of medium: everything passes through them, and they pass through everything, from the vividly depicted atrocities of the past and present, beginning with the religious wars of the early modern period and extending to the war against Ukraine. At one point, Kay is said to retrieve voices from holding patterns. Preiwuß lays countless trails that invite readers to lose their way again and again. In doing so, she draws on sources as diverse as Bachkieselbuch and Tagebuch eines Söldners aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg.

Rodeo is a wildly imaginative “Märchenadoptiv” featuring guest appearances by Iron Hans, Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Little Red Riding Hood, Baron Münchhausen, and Dracula. Registers and fields of imagery shift at high speed, moving between Pokémon, Kali mantras, and nettle jellyfish. Only a single line separates the Chilean earthquake from Christian Petzold. Minecraft and The Last of Us stand alongside Dante’s Göttliche Komödie on equal footing. At times, Rodeo seems to inhabit a parallel universe governed by entirely different laws of expansion, through which our own world nevertheless becomes all the more visible.

Marion Poschmann’s new book Flussfragmente (Verbrecher Verlag, 2026), her seventh poetry collection, strikes a markedly different tone. Here, the meander, inspired by Hogarth’s line of beauty, flows into the supple form of sapphic odes animated by a wandering dactyl. Poschmann has described her interest as lying in the interplay between the natural world and civilisation. She approaches this theme through the example of the Seseke, a 32-kilometre stream that rises in the district of Soest and flows into the Lippe.

Over the course of industrialisation, the Seseke was transformed into an open wastewater channel carrying sewage from factories and households. Beginning in the mid-1980s, efforts were made to restore the river and its surrounding ecosystem, creating floodplain landscapes along its widened course. Poschmann follows the river through these reclaimed environments, reflecting on the sense of renewal and possibility that such ecological recovery can bring. She records the landscape in both verse and image, using the Suminagashi technique, in which organic forms emerge from ink suspended on the surface of water. In much the same way, the poet’s own script seems to dissolve into a fluid act of beautiful writing that flows across the blank page.

Flussfragmente gathers a collection of these curious impressions of landscapes that have found a new balance at the unlikely setting of the Kamener Kreuz motorway interchange. Poschmann writes about waymarks and signs of transformation, as well as the meandering, wayward nature of water itself, in whose movements she glimpses the fluttering sleeves and trailing robes of an ancient god.

A joint event of Haus für Poesie with Berlin Verlag and Verbrecher Verlag

In Reading & Conversation Marion Poschmann, Kerstin Preiwuß
Moderation Nadja Küchenmeister