Dreamlike is a place to begin, one of many inadequate ways I might speak of the poems of Max Sessner. Liquid is better, as his poems move like water and surprise me by revealing spaces between objects and people, between moods and moments that I didnt know existed. If this book were a house, itd be on the edge of town and have a tree growing through its roof; a river, itd know your name but never quite make it to the sea; a photo, the person you miss most would be in it but turned around and looking the other way. In searching for passages to quote that would give you a sense of the imagination and vitality of Sessners work, its strangely touching warmth, I found it impossible to excise a portion of a poem without including the whole. Lifelike, then, is what Ill end with, or better yet, alive.Bob Hicok, author of Sex & Love
In Francesca Bells nimble and swift translations, Max Sessners poems come across from German into English with a deft sureness and dramatic delicacy. The wry, sometimes ironic, voice and point of view of these poems is also probing of the shadow mysteries that animate our everyday lives. Silence, loneliness, unsettled companionship, chaste assertion, and everywhere a sense of shifting depthsSessners poems observe what we miss, and ask us to look again. They are quietly confident about what they know, and what they offer is the kind of value we find only in real poems. Im grateful to have them.Joshua Weiner, author of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish
