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Distributed for Seagull Books

Father’s on the Phone with the Flies

A Selection

Translated by Thomas Cooper
An unexpected, exciting work from one of the most protean writers ever to win the Nobel Prize.

To create the poems in this collection, Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in the form of a collage. Father’s on the Phone with the Flies presents seventy-three of Müller’s collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-color reproductions of the originals. Müller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity, and startling, surreal metaphors—the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in color, font, and type size. Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Müller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience.

200 pages | 75 COLOR PLATES | 5 x 8 | © 2018

The Seagull Library of German Literature

Poetry


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Reviews

“By any measure, Father’s on the Phone with the Flies deserves to be on the list of the best poetry books of 2018.”

Rain Taxi

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