HAUS FÜR POESIE

Ricardo Domeneck (born 1977 in Bebedouro, São Paulo, Brazil) has lived in Berlin since 2002. He has published ten poetry collections and two volumes of short stories in Brazil and Portugal and has received several major literary awards, including the Prêmio Jabuti and the Prêmio Alphonsus de Guimaraens. Following Nach Körper: Ein Handbuch. (2019), Verlagshaus Berlin is now publishing a second German-language selection of his poetry, Die Sturheit der Lungen, translated by Odile Kennel and featuring poems written between 2013 and 2023.

Many of the poems engage with questions of ancestry and inheritance, exploring how histories of violence and displacement continue to resonate in the present body. They reflect on family histories, intergenerational memory, and attempts at repair. One poem addresses the poet’s illiterate grandparents, whose working-class names the speaker, now a poet, left behind. Elsewhere, a confrontation with a father who would reject his son's homosexuality remains unresolved, recalling the literary tradition of a Brief an den Vater without ever becoming one. Alongside these reflections, the collection also includes love poems such as the Oden für Maximin and a cycle of separation poems centred on cigarettes and attachment. Throughout the volume, the speaker persists despite loss, learning to navigate what the poems describe as a growing vocabulary of absence.

Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (born 1989 in Hesse, Germany) made his poetry debut in 2022 with Prinzenbad (Elif Verlag). His other publications include Muslimaniac. Die Karriere eines Feindbildes (Verbrecher Verlag 2023) and the novel Hundesohn (Suhrkamp Verlag 2025), which was awarded the ZDFaspekte Literature Prize and the Max Frisch Advancement Award.

His poetry cycle “Abul Abbas – Elefantengeister”, which received the Wolfgang Weyrauch Advancement Award, is now included in his second poetry collection, binde mich odysseus gleich an die ubahnstange (Elif Verlag 2026). The volume reimagines the story of Abul Abbas, the first elephant recorded north of the Alps, who arrived in Aachen in 802 as a diplomatic gift from the Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd to Charlemagne. In Keskinkılıç’s poems, however, Abul Abbas quickly leaves historical Aachen behind and finds his way into Berlin’s queer nightlife and cultural scenes.

Throughout the collection, figures continually transform and assume new identities as they explore desire, intimacy, and belonging. Mythological characters, historical figures, and contemporary urban subjects meet and mingle: Ishtar, Şahmaran, Penthesilea, Achilles, Dionysus, and many others appear in playful, unexpected constellations. The poems move freely between myth and pop culture, queerness and history, combining humour, transformation, and sensuality in a poetic world where identities remain fluid and constantly in motion.

In Reading & Conversation Ricardo Domeneck, Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç
Moderation Anna Julian Mendlik