Poetic prose meditations written in a lyrical stream-of-consciousness style by renowned Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker.
It is summer in this book, even if nature often does not hold to summer. The flowers either have tiny buds or have long since withered. It is summer in the book, asserts Mayröcker’s work, because the summer light is switched on: sometimes blazingly bright, sometimes darkened with thunderclouds. At the same time, there is a magical light in this writing. In these stream-of-conscious prose poem meditations, Mayröcker formulates a poetics of simultaneity of all that is not: “not the scenes I remember, rather, it is the sensations accompanying those scenes.”
Strictly composed in form and language while luxuriantly proliferated in daydreams and nightmares, just sitting around here GRUESOMELY now is a significant volume in the radical late work of the great Viennese poet.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important Austrian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has published over eighty works since 1956, including poetry, prose, radio plays, and children’s books. She lives in Vienna. Roslyn Theobald has translated Mayröcker’s brütt, or The Sighing Gardens and Requiem for Ernst Jandl, which was also published by Seagull Books.
REVIEWS
Praise for Friederike Mayröcker
“Friederike Mayröcker’s language strolls through the pleasure garden of love, plunges into deadly gorges, and weeps in lonely rooms.”—Die Welt
“With breathless abandon, [Mayröcker] has continually expanded her oeuvre and exploded notions of genre and convention, while always getting to the heart of this earthly living.”?BOMB magazine
“Friederike Mayröcker, among the world’s greatest living writers, reinterprets literary vocation as total theater.”?Wayne Koestenbaum