Herta Müller: Father’s on the Phone with the Flies. A Selection

To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize–winner Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in a the form of a collage.

Father’s on the Phone with the Flies presents 73 of Müller’s collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-colour reproductions of the originals.

Müller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity and startling, surreal metaphors—the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in colour, font and type size.

Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Müller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience.

Herta Müller was born in a German-speaking community in western Romania in 1953. She published her first collection of short stories in 1982. In 1987, she left Romania for West Berlin, where she continued to write and publish. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Herta Müller
Father’s on the Phone with the Flies
A Selection
Translated by Thomas Cooper
ISBN: 9781803090450
Pages: 200 pages
73 colour plates
Publication Year: 2022
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 x 8
Rights: UCP
Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature
Category: Poetry
£11.99

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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