An uncompromising masterpiece that transforms memory and renewal into a wild world of words.

Fleurs—flowers, flower petals—a title that might suggest a gentle world of blooming fields and soft breezes. But in the hands of Friederike Mayröcker, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this is a book of a very different kind. It is a wild, vivid journey into a rich, elemental landscape.

If you follow Mayröcker’s path, you find not a comfortable meadow but steep, stony ground—a place where her inimitable voice rings out in all its power and purity. Unsentimental and crystal clear, Mayröcker’s writing is driven by a single purpose: to create images of remarkable vividness in a language as free, bold, and fresh as if it were newly invented.

The final installment of Mayröcker’s trilogy, following études and cahier, fleurs is a book of memory and renewal, protest and revelation—a testimony to the enduring magic of writing itself.

Translated by: Donna Stonecipher