Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems

The first English translation of Germany's leading contemporary poet.

...what is the whole surreal jokeshop
of terrors compared to the

infinitely chance little
tricks of a poem.

--from "MonoLogical Poem #1"

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, "the best refuge was a closed mouth." In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid imag…