2024 Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry Winner

The first German collection by the most popular contemporary Israeli poet Agi Mishol. 

Mishol’s poems are topical, melancholic, self-ironic and deeply moving thanks to the vividness of her astonishing imagery. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, the poet also follows the traces of today’s suffering, whether she writes about a replanted olive tree that represents the uprooting of the Palestinian people, or about a twenty-year-old shahida who is “pregnant with explosives under her wide dress.” Despite all the conflicts depicted here, hope reigns in Mishol’s poems because even if “there is nothing new under the sun / perhaps there is above it.”

Rights Sold:

Germany: Hanser

Reviews:

“Not one poem out of more than seventy falls short aesthetically, not one line in them is wasted… If there are poems that border on perfection, then Agi Mishol's collection must be counted among them.” —Poet Alexandru Bulucz for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“[The collection] is immediately accessible, enchantingly beautiful in countless verses, but it works like a Trojan horse. That is to say, it contains much within, harbouring at times profound (human and political) abysses beneath all its beauty. And its impact unfolds gradually; these poems not only linger in the mind, their sound not only in the ear – they penetrate deeper – into the soul, the heart, the spirit.” —Berliner Morgenpost

“[Mishol] records precisely, perceives the finest cracks and contradictions, and idealises neither nature nor love, neither her own self nor the course of events in the world. But her gaze is always empathetic, and her mischief mixed with melancholy is due to the awareness of her own imperfection and vulnerability… What she writes about death, the existence of things and responsibility, is a depth that is rooted in the concrete… Agi Mishol knows what she is writing about. At the same time, the words know even more than she does.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung