Book
/
Poetry
Things That Are Black, Angular, and Crisp
Year
2022
By
Pale Ink Editions
Format
Hardcover, 88 pages ISBN 978-0-000000-02-8
Language
English, German
Description
Most poets sort the world by meaning. Lena Müller sorts it by texture: what is black, what has corners, what snaps. The result is a book of inventories that turns out to be a book about grief, about family, about the few things in a life that end cleanly.
These prose poems are funny before they are sad, and precise before they are either. Müller writes like someone who has run her hand along every edge in the house and remembered which ones cut. I have not looked at a piano lid the same way since.
Keep it on the kitchen table, next to the knives.
— Noor Dekker, poet and critic
Excerpt
A burnt toast edge. A piano lid. The word no, said quickly. I keep a list of things that break cleanly, because so little does.
Umbrella ribs in February. The spine of a paperback opened too far. A sentence that ends exactly where it should. My grandmother's handwriting, which never once curved.
I do not know what the list is for. Some nights I read it aloud, and the room becomes a drawer of small sharp objects, each one wrapped in its own silence.
— “Inventory of Clean Breaks”, in Part I: Black, p. 9
