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Christine Lavant's poems have long been part of the established canon of post-war literature. As a narrator, she is a discovery of recent years. Christine Lavant wrote poems that, in their linguistic idiosyncrasy and existential brokenness, Thomas Bernhard considered to be among the "high points of German poetry". He described her poetry as "the elementary testimony of a person who has been abused by all good spirits". Lavant herself saw her art as a "mutilated life, a sin against the spirit, unforgivable" and was nevertheless certain of the poetic power of her poems: "When I wrote poetry, I tore every part of your existence from under your feet and placed it in your innermost face as something never before perceived by you". Christine Lavant's prose approaches the fates and inner worlds of her characters with great empathy and unadorned realism, very directly and unmistakably poetic. With "formally somnambulistic certainty" (Franz Haas in the NZZ), Lavant tells of what she knows best: of wounded children's and women's souls, of the subtle and less subtle social differences, of poverty, illness and exclusion, of forced conformity, bigotry and violence, but also of the liberating power of love and fantasy. All this is brought together in this four-volume edition of Christine Lavant's works, which contains both the poems and stories published during her lifetime and all the texts from her estate.