My
German Dictionary, which won the fourteenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry
Prize, is a guide to an idiosyncratic interior country, a map of the experience
of absorbing and being absorbed by Central European language, culture,
aesthetics, and history. It is a catalogue of small beloved things inflected by
massive horrors. The poems are home to and haunted by Franz Marc’s horses, ETA
Hoffmann’s tales, the Great War, Bertolt Brecht, Rosa Luxemburg, enchanted
bears, Weimar Berlin, and vanished relatives, along with an entire alphabet of
mishearings, mnemonics, and valentines for the German language. These are the
poems of an historian wrestling with mastery of the unmasterable, the histories
in miniature of a poet.