Translated from the German by Francesca Bell
from #77 - Fall 2022
“I first came upon the poems of Max Sessner in the pages of the Austrian literary journal manuskripte. I was reading German-language journals with an eye toward finding a poet in whose work I could immerse myself, and those first eleven Sessner poems caught my attention and held it fast. I wrote immediately to ask permission to translate them. In Max Sessner’s work, I found a poetry that is simultaneously melancholy and funny, deeply tender and yet eviscerating. His voice is entirely, profoundly his own, and his poems, deceptively accessible, contain complex, often uncanny, ideas and sentiments. I remain fascinated and humbled by how deftly he uses surrealism, not to obscure reality, but to illuminate it.”
Max Sessner was born in 1959 in Fürth, Germany. He has long lived with his wife in Augsburg and has held a wide variety of jobs, working as a bookseller for the Augsburg public library, and currently for the department of public health. Sessner is the author of eight books of poetry including, most recently, Das Wasser von Gestern (The Water of Yesterday).