HAUS FÜR POESIE

Anna Julian Mendlik (born 1986 in Hannover)’s new poetry collection Dante im Darkroom (published by Verlagshaus Berlin in 2026) is a declaration of war on prudishness in German poetry — a “dictionary in the diction of desire,” featuring spanking, fisting, cunnilingus, and dirty talk. The cast of characters from paradise, hell, and myth crowds these texts — a chronicle “from Theseus to Bezos.” Readers encounter Eve in a “ribbed shirt,” the “sweet pussyboy” Antinous, and a Daphne who spurns Apollo and would rather stay with Diana. Arachne, less embarrassing than Spider-Man, sends ancient #MeToo reports; Orpheus turns into a singer; Pluto into an incel; and Sisyphus into a long-suffering BDSM slave. The bath overflows with metaphors, and “on Lesbos the tents are burning.” Along the way one learns instructive things about the kinship of Rome and Eros, and about the apple of paradise with its “organic seal and fair trade” label — for example, about the proportional relationship between knowledge and sugar content. The whole thing is underscored by a soundtrack “on the tablet from the teenage years”: Ne me quitte pas, Don't Leave Me This Way, It's a Sin.

The poems in Farhad Showghi’s new volume Die nähere Umgebung (published by kookbooks in 2026) are no less radical — though in a completely different way and through very different writing strategies. A great attentiveness surrounds them and dwells within them. Gently, the small things come into view: the useless, what one turns over and examines in the “dust light.” It is about the “patient tumult of what is dabbed on,” about how one’s perspective on things changes after taking a “third of a step to the side.” Nothing goes unnoticed, whether it is “monosyllabic new beginnings” or “a gliding in the foliage.” The “side events” — wandering glances across “the crackle of trees and hedges,” the distant blue dissolving into haze — matter more than what happens on the main stage. Even the slightest moment can become an epoch in the everyday flow of the day: the sunlight and the way it settles across a sloping roof, the slow stepping out of a garden, the heaviness that gathers on the undersides of balconies, a footpath that veers southward, and the drooping branches above it.

In reading & conversation Anna Julian Mendlik, Farhad Showghi
Moderation Alexander Kappe