Poetic Affairs deals with the complex and fascinating interface between literature and life through the prism of the lives and works of the German-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan (1920-70), the Leningrad native, US poet laureate, and Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Brodsky (1940-96), and the most significant contemporary German poet, Durs Grünbein (born 1962).

Michael Eskin teaches German and comparative literature at Columbia
University. He is the author of Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of
Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan (2000) as well as a book in German on Nabokov's version of Pushkin's Eugen Onegin (1994).