Pitch & Glint
On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents' suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, “You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.”
Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. After an apprenticeship in construction, he worked as a carpenter and bricklayer. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Haus. His writing has won many prizes, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. His volume of non-fiction In Case of Loss and the poetry collection Pitch & Glint are published in 2024 in English by And Other Stories. Some of his stories, poems and essays have appeared in English in journals and magazines including Granta, Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, Poetry, PROTOTYPE, the New Statesman, Shearsman, Stand, the TLS and The White Review.
Born in Belém, Brazil, to English and Swiss parents, Stefan Tobler is a translator and the founder of And Other Stories. Authors he has translated include Clarice Lispector, Raduan Nassar and Arno Geiger. He grew up in northern Brazil and southern England, and has now made his home in the Dark Peak.
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