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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.
About the author
Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Born in Boston, she was educated at Marlboro College and Boston University, where she earned an MA in poetry and a PhD in history. Her poems, criticism, and scholarly work have appeared in
Literary Imagination, Slate, Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, The Brecht Yearbook, New German Critique, and elsewhere. She has taught European history at Simmons College, the University of Hartford, and Colby College, creative writing at Boston University, and serves as a Reader for
Sugar House Review. Alongside writing poems, she is at work on a historical monograph about a community of German- speaking intellectuals in exile, and translating the childhood memoirs of Margarete Steffin.
