HAUS FÜR POESIE

Eleven years ago, poet Georg Leß (born 1981 in Arnsberg) published the small parasitenpresse volume Schlachtgewicht, in classic saddle-stitch binding, as is typical for chapbooks. Barely 14 pages long, yet packed with intensity. Readers are transported into a nocturnal, unstable world filled with “richly blood-suffused afterimages,” with leg-irons, room fires, smoking frog ponds, and “underbrush desires.” Foxes and coyotes creep between the verses; there is also a wolf serving as a guide dog, and a hunter swallowed by his own trail. Last year, the follow-up volume appeared: Schlachtgewicht 2 (Parasitenpresse 2025), and over roughly twice the length, Leß continues exactly where he left off. These poems are “hasty liturgies” that lead into “gullet-like distances” and speak of the “knotted silence from the margins.” Linguistically so rich (we hear of bloodletting, group X-rays, and the shyness of big cats), they make even desolation generous, and the “disposable glove” develops ambitions.

Márió Z. Nemes (born 1982 in Ajka, Hungary), who has translated some of Georg Leß’s poems into Hungarian, shares with him a fondness for the offbeat. Like Leß, he is a poet of monsters, myths, and mutations. His work constitutes an attack on good taste that is as effective as it is pleasurable: he draws his influences from the recombination of seemingly familiar topoi from Westerns, horror, film noir, pulp, and science fiction. German-speaking audiences were introduced to him in 2016 with the poetry collection Puschkins Brüste (Edition Solitude; German translation: Orsolya Kalász, Monika Rinck, and Matthias Kniep). In the texts of this volume, wild animals dwell in eyeballs, morphine suitcases are pushed across altar stones, and a halved centaur smokes his last cigarette. In nature as Nemes imagines it, things smack like in a stew, and, incidentally, Antonin Artaud merges with a certain Leatherface (yes, the one from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). His most recent volume appeared in 2025, titled Irgalom és számonkérés (Mercy and Reckoning). In this book, “the small demonologies” become the great words of our existence. It deals with nothing less than the connection between Baroque and milk, and how to create a heaven from a slab of head-cheese bacon. Some of the poems will be translated from Hungarian specifically for this event.

Moderation Lara Sielmann

The event will be held in German without interpretation.

Funded by: Collegium Hungaricum