Poetry Chapbook_02

With poems in German by Matthias Nawrat, Milena Adam, ariel rosé

With drawings by Jochen Schneider

5,- Euro plus shipping

Publication date: April 2025, 26 pages, edition of 150

Matthias Nawrat’s Four Poems gathers the debris of a lost metaphysical framework. Tiny harvestmen cluster on the forest floor into a “pulsating black super-fluff” that protects them from predators. Single-celled organisms and one-legged beings are united by their search for connection. Human culture harbors a destructive force that, as in Little Boy, can sometimes be unleashed with the push of a button.

Milena Adam’s Rocket Poems are composed in a collage-like aesthetic, using fragments of text taken from magazines and other printed materials. Typography adds a further layer of meaning, playing with pop-cultural associations. From this anarchic arrangement, a distinct wit emerges. The poems speak of space travel and peer into a “shadowed parallel world.” In the depths of technology stirs a “slight unease.”

In Countless Lights, ariel rosé looks back into the past and finds traces of a violent history and kindred spirits who say: “You are not alone.” The lyrical self is searching for a “landscape of one’s own consciousness.” There is comfort in the knowledge that humans and nature — blackberries, the sea, and the self — form an organic whole.

Jochen Schneider’s abstract drawings explore small-format materiality through a variety of forms. They combine hatching and flatness, conveying the gravity of corporeality and shifting forces as well as spatial motion. They make room both for the lightness of white space and the weight of dense, dark masses.

Poetry Chapbook_01

With poems in German by Hannes Becker, Lorena Simmel, Andreas Martin Widmann

With drawings by Anke Becker

5.- Euro plus shipping

Publication date: 20 Dec 2024, Edition: 150

Order via info@boxofrainpress.com

Between January and April 2024, Hannes Becker wrote a poem every day. In the "Tagesgedichte" (tr. Daily Poems), he wrote down what happened, occupied or preoccupied him on each day. It's all about what fits and should fit into a day and into a poem. By combining rhyme and non-rhyme, the texts sharpen the focus on the materiality of language. They are associative, sometimes political and mostly romantic. Friendship and love play a role, as do ‘tough animals’ and living together in the big city.

Anke Becker's "Konzeptlose Zeichnungen" (tr. Conceptless Drawings) were created without any great demands on the result and without any content or formal specifications, usually in the morning before starting other works. Each sheet was stamped with the respective date. The random becomes the starting point and the prerequisite for everything else - for what is controlled and thought through.

Lorena Simmel's "Drei Gedichte" (tr. Three Poems) capture sharp, precise observations. In a clear, almost prosaic tone, the texts take us to the edge of a training area, back to her parents' house and into the centre of Wedding - between sesame curls and weightlifting. Whether haiku or long poem, without pathos but with sensitivity, quiet windows of experience open up here.

In Andreas Martin Widmann's "Die Kirche meines Bruders" (tr. My Brother's Church), a close look is taken at small details in which entire worlds can be found. The poems defend the world of margins and small things. They take us to junkyards, to the garden of childhood, to a bird sanctuary and an open-air swimming pool. Memories of a childhood in search of glue kicks and ‘plastic soldiers in a biscuit tin’ are combined with quiet anger at the disenchantment of adult life.