Whether in poetry, fiction, radio drama or sound installations, Esther Dischereit's work represents a unique departure in recent European writing: a distinctive, off-beat syntax of German-Jewish intimacy with the fractured consciousness and deeply rutted cultural landscape of today's Germany. Sometimes a Single Leaf, mirroring the development of Esther Dischereit's poetry across three decades, includes selections from three of her books as well as a sampling of more recent, uncollected poems. It is her first book of poetry in English translation.
"From these splinters, flowers bloom:
where the dead lie, trees grow and
we must walk among them. In these poems,
Esther Dischereit, whose mother was one
of the few who survived the Holocaust
in hiding within Nazi Germany,
lays the present over the past with
piercing effect."
Preti Taneja, author of Wir, die wir jung sind