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Part photo album, part diagram, part dream, Tim Kahl's Possessing Yourself hacks a life out of the harsh terrain of experience. Here the poet shares with us the things that charge his emotions, his imagination, his self. That he does it without solipsism is a marvel; that he does it with honesty is a gift. In vivid narrative and acute lyric, these poems bring us close to the complexities of a whole human being. This is an exceptional book. — Joshua McKinney As the author floats up into his marvelous dream of animals, the dark hand of history seizes his ankle and hlds him. He is in hallucinatory agony, like the tethered Marcello Mastroianni at the beginning of Fellini's 8 1/2, and it propels us into the whole story: how to possess a life. There is the ghost of a pet dog, a hummingbird, cattle at a fair, a dead duck, a flirtatious moth. They are all intimations of a transcendent world we hardly dared hope for. Martin Luther and his minions — friends and family, both living and dead — press in at the edges, but the wonder remains. Kahl's Possessing Yourself never stops amazing us. — Lawrence R. Smith For ordering information, visit Word Tech Press

Rolf Haufs was born in 1935 in Düsseldorf, the son of a bank employee. After a brief time as an exporter from 1956 to 1960, he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a writer and editor, and he has lived there since 1960. He has published numerous books. Among these volumes are poems, stories, children's books, novels, and plays. He won the Bremen Prize literature in 1985, the Hans Erich Nossack Prize in 1993, the Peter Huchel Prize in 2003, and the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 1990, shortly after Self Portrait was published in 1988. Tim Kahl's translation of Rolf Haufs's Self Portrait brings to Ameican readers the work of a poet vastly different from any now writing in this country. Haufs is different because he writes of the city, or because he uses the prose poem as his committed form, or because he pays attention to the particulars of bourgeois/capitalist life — but because his calm, cool (even cold) voice speaks from the end-time of meaning as solace. His mordancy is his poetry, his poetry his refusal, his refusal his shield. This is a voice we need to hear today, when so many of our poets wish to simply exchange bits of emotional autobiography. There is no apology in Haufs, and Tim Kahl has caught that voice perfectly. — James DenBoer For ordering information, visit Bald Trickster Press