Grenzwerte

Max Czolleks new poetry collection "Grenzwerte" is a grand tour through places, discourses, and history. For Czollek, poetry is always also a way of speaking about the past: a form of grappling with the present. He confronts the asynchronicity of time – this chain of calendar pages, the feeling that the zipper slider is broken – with the tools of poetry, using metaphor and collage. He is not a passive chronicler; his verses are always ready to strike back, to appropriate language structures and reformat them. Thus, "Grenzwerte" is not only a logbook of the present but also one of the poet himself: I feel as if I am sitting in one of my poems, and perhaps I am.