Reading poetry isn’t always easy. Maybe it’s a collective trauma from German class, maybe it’s because contemporary poetry rarely tells you where to begin. Yet so many people write such good stuff. Here are four and a half Berlin poetry collections for anyone who enjoys genre-bending and wants an entry point into contemporary forms of writing. Sophia Eisenhut’s Spam in Alium treats writing as an ongoing conversation that observes, comments on, and questions itself. Between letters with no clear object of affection, drafts that get stuck, and a taste for theoretical friction, a body of text emerges that folds essay, poetry, and inner monologue into each other. Moving between references from literature, pop culture, and her own life, Eisenhut negotiates closeness, shame, and self-interrogation with linguistic precision. As a reader, I understand everything and nothing at the same time. From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson by Elise Houcek and Zack Darsee also plays with overlap, but starts from a poetic crime story. Language becomes an overstimulated interface, shot through with media logic, references, and interference. The book plays with surveillance, narration, and loss of control, and translates the constant background noise of the present into a dense, often overwhelming textual landscape. I feel like I’m somewhere between an investigative episode of ‘The Three Investigators’, the accumulation of all of my friends’ note app notes, and a neurodivergent stream of consciousness. If this is contemporary poetry, I never want it to end. (And if you’d like to be a poet yourself and don’t know where to start, Zack Darsee runs excellent workshops.)
If all of this sounds too academic for you, Olga Mai offers an easier yet heavier way in with her self-published collection Break My Heart So I Can Pay My Rent. The title says it all. The starting point for her very personal little book was heartbreak. The texts circle dating, work, financial insecurity, and emotional exhaustion, staying close to everyday speech while turning it into melancholic imagery. Anyone who wasn’t sad before will be afterwards. The book was launched at Café Tiergarten and is available on request. Katharine Spatz’s Season Zines are small and exquisite. Each season, the Berlin poet releases a pocket-sized selection of her poems. The current issue matches the mood: seven pocket-sized poems to get through winter. If you wait until spring, you can buy the whole quartet from her via DM. Honourable mention goes to Postponed by Sanna Helena Berger, who was meant to curate an exhibition but instead invited poets and writers to contribute texts. The pieces on doubt, fatigue, inertia and collective overload form a polyphonic collection that makes faltering continuation, hesitation, and pausing legible as a shared experience. The reader is available online for free. If you’re looking for a place to start, begin anywhere. Everything else will fall into place as you read.
Text & Photos: Inga Krumme
Spam in Alium, From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson, Zack Darsee, Break My Heart So I Can Pay My Rent, Season Zines, Postponed
You can order Break My Heart So I Can Pay My Rent via email.
Season Zines via DM @spatzlova.
