3.5 stars

At their best these poems fuse a certain cleverness with the undeniable language of loss during periods or areas of transition.

dreaming language

my small tongue dreams up
a land where it builds nests of words
to swarm out over the borders
that are not its own. it wants
to outgrow itself, to glide through distant
spirit path of water or gas,
to dive down to deep sea vents,
to have a term for every phenomenon
and its dubious shadows, to inhabit
those who speak and write it
as shimmering populations of words, to lay
its larvae in their pores. my language
wants to be unbridled and large, it wants
to leave behind the fears that occupy it,
all those stories, dark and bright,
in which its worth and weight
is questioned. only when it dreams
does it soar, supple and light,
by its very nature nearly song.

Haderlap writes in German but she was born into the Slovenian-speaking minority of Carinthia. So clearly the borders of language and identity and violence are where her work comes alive. At least that's how I felt about these poems.

I will say, however, that quite a few of these bounced off of me. They felt overly intellectual, cold, and disconnected. That might be an intended effect or it might be something untranslatable, I don't know.