In Case of Loss

If this book were a building, it would surely be a makeshift shack of some kind. A shelter for forgotten objects but also a workshop in which wheels are allowed to turn without always having to touch the ground. The views from the window keep changing. No sooner have you glimpsed old tank roads running past dunes in Fischland by the Baltic, than youre somehow looking out from a hotel room in Los Angeles, or gazing over a lawn, which at first lies outside a proscribed poets house in a remote forest, and is then transported to a cultural centre in Rome. Theres a village too, still in the GDR, where everyone is tired thanks to the Cold War decision to convert it into a vast uranium mine. This is an exceptional and absorbing book, in which Lutz Seiler successfully recovers and also recreates the narrative of our times. Patrick Wright ---- 'It is never about reconstructing. Memory does not bring back what was forgotten. Indeed, the person who remembers doesn't even know for sure that what is remembered ever existed. . . Seiler's inimitable style as a storyteller, the wilful waywardness and weight of what he has to say, the intensity (and personal tact) of his engagement with the landscapes of others' poetries and lives all make these essays a lively portrait of the writer surrounded by his library. Seiler sets standards for reflection in art today. At the same time, he gives us a sense of the pagan-sacramental importance of objects in poetry.' Sibylle Cramer, Suddeutsche Zeitung

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 prize-winning second novel Star 111, his volume of non-fiction In Case of Loss, and the poetry collection Pitch and Glint, his important first major poetry collection, are published simultaneously in English by And Other Stories. Some of his stories, poems and essays have appeared in English in the journals The White Review, Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation and PN Review.