Orange Streetlights

Lena Müller started walking home the long way the winter her father left the city. The bus would have taken twelve minutes; walking took forty. These poems were written in the difference.

They belong to the hour after shops close and before anyone is asleep, under the old sodium lamps that cities are now replacing, street by street, with clean white light. Müller wanted to keep that orange before it disappeared, and she has. In her hands a closed bakery becomes a stage set, and every stranger at a bus stop looks about to say something important.

Nothing important is said in this book. People lock doors, miss trams, carry bread home. That is exactly its achievement.

— Ilse Marten, poet and translator, from the foreword