In her long poem “HÖLLENFAHRT” (“Freeway to Hell,” translated by Nicholas Grindell), Monika Rinck explores automobile death drives and other underworld journeys. In an unstoppable succession of poems, she travels through striking afterlife topographies and along the German federal government's approved accelerated road projects into a new co-world in which the rigidity of frost can no longer be distinguished from the rigidity of heat. “The poems stage time ─ or, more precisely, time at a standstill as a moment of reflection in and after a catastrophically developing era of so-called progress”, (Klaus Schenk, TU-Dotmund). Strange voices as companions! We read lines written in inaccessible spaces, like those on the inside of sarcophagi, which have many different functions: Consolation, entertainment, guidance, directions, dietetics, assurance, invocation, perseverance, concern, table setting, inventory. Meanwhile, the foliage freezes, the de-spatialization by digital demons continues, death cults of the present are apparently unstoppable. But wishes still appear in infinitive.

After the reading Monika Rinck will talk with the renowned poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky on poetic space.

About the speakers:

Monika Rinck's poems, essays and translations have appeared under a range of imprints since 1998. Her latest collection, Hoellenfahrt & Entenstaat (Freeway to Hell & Duckstate as well), was published by kookbooks in 2024. Since 2023, she has been teaching Literary Writing at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, having previously taught at the Institute of Language Arts in Vienna. Among other awards, she has received the Ernst Jandl Prize and the Kleist Prize.

Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and now lives in both New York and Berlin. His latest book of poetry, The Feeling Sonnets, published in 2022 by Carcanet in the UK and by NYRB Poets in the US, examines the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt (KookBooks 2017), it won the 2019 Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. An acclaimed translator of Russian poetry and formerly a resident writer at Humboldt University and Free University in Berlin, Ostashevsky teaches at the Liberal Studies program at NYU.

Date and Time: Monday, March 10 from 5:30 to 7:00 pm

Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003

More Information: https://forms.gle/iiSMXqi3tegSmJRx6