My German Dictionary

My German Dictionary

A book of startling, radiant images that ferry the poems to their destinations of discovery and illumination. … [T]hese are wise and brave poems, from a wise and brave hand, A to Z. They go to the heart of the heart of the matter, whatever it is, and wherever it is. Like sharp little picks, they de-ice and reveal. … [A] beautiful and—it seems to me—necessary book. — from Charles Wright’s foreword

Abundant imagination, as heartbreaking and wild as folk tales. Informed historical understanding. Melody in the sentences and lines. Each of these is a rare poetic gift, and all three combined animate Katherine Hollander’s My German Dictionary. These poems with their lexicon of grief confront the terrors of history in a way that is brooding, clear-eyed, and blessedly inventive. — Robert Pinsky

Reviews of My German Dictionary

Tupelo Quarterly (July 1, 2021)

Very infrequently is it that readers find a contemporary poetry collection that presents the past in such vivid imagery that readers feel they are entering the present. In poems spanning historical and philosophical relevance, Katherine Hollander’s My German Dictionary, instead of playing on the darkness and anger often stereotypically associated with German language and perhaps even German history, compactly yet gracefully weaves word play and photograph-like images to portray seemingly personal, yet universal, histories. By the collection’s end, the word plays and images culminate in a celebration of language, symbolic definition, and a defiant rally against literal and figurative death … Readers specifically interested in witness poems of both the personal and historical variety will appreciate Hollander’s collection for its expanse of time, place, and personage. Those with linguistic interests will quickly engage with the collection’s celebration of an often misunderstood language, while those interested in ancestry and the complexities of identity will easily relate to the Euro-American conversations political and otherwise. My German Dictionary is a collection worthy of multiple readings, with each reading providing a new interpretation and linguistic and artistic experience. — Nicole Yurcaba. The whole review can be read at https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/uncategorized/poems-of-witness-an-examination-of-history-and-cultural-complexity-in-katherine-hollanders-my-german-dictionary/

Sugar House Review (Spring/Summer 2021)

It takes skilled wordcrafting, an ear for clarity, and a penchant for multiple levels of meaning to hone syntax into diction as rich as one’s country of origin. Katherine Hollander applies those traits to rouse language from an uncomfortable heritage, fashioning stanzas that expand into layers of national and ancestral history defined with elegant simplicity, intricate imagery, and complex metaphor … Hollander’s skill in storytelling is enhanced by the creative accuracy of a poet/scholar … What a privilege to be led by this writer of inspiring intellect into a collection that reveals ever-intensifying histories of people and events, each unfolding in poem after poem, section after section, to culminate in a memorable volume that begs rereading, time after time, like all good tales of seemingly impossible human nature. — Star Coulbrooke.   The whole review can be read at https://sugarhousereviews.blogspot.com/2021/06/blog-post_25.html

American Book Review (42:2, January-February 2021)

Katherine Hollander is a poet and a historian and this twinning shines through in her first collection of poems … that won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize … Her poems hover over a historical landscape — the Great War, the Somme, World War II, Shoah, and Weimar Berlin — and are intertwined with an internal landscape of memory, loss, death and hope … Hollander is a bridge between historical and political realms and the world of poetry. It is her perception of history and the relevance of the intersections of society, history and art that are wanted in poets today. Her poetry radiates with flights of imagination, historical insight, folk stories, and heartfelt imagery. Her collection should be read and taught not only by lovers of poetry but historians, and history teachers who want to bring their students imaginately to confront the terrors of history.

Rain Taxi Review (Summer 2020)

A book of poetry can sometimes function as a time machine, and that’s what happens with My German Dictionary. ‘I couldn’t be / a good historian,’ Hollander confesses in the opening poem, ‘Confession (Invitation),’ ‘so I wrote poems.’ These poems take us to Europe in the years between the two world wars, the landscape of Osip Mandelstam, Rosa Luxemburg, and Kathe Kollwitz. Over and over, the author turns her imagination loose on history … To write historical poems, a writer must do much research, but that alone won’t bring a poem alive—the language must drive the poem, and the reader must feel transported. This happens constantly with these poems … [My German Dictionary is] a volume that much deserves the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize it was awarded … The closing words to this resonant book are ‘Take my hand. Let’s go.’ For many readers, the only place to go is back into the magical world of My German Dictionary.” — John Bradley

Ploughshares of Emerson College (142, Winter 2019-2020)

A magnificent first book of poetry, selected for publication by Charles Wright, who accurately calls these poems ‘wise and brave.’ A lexicon of grief, this book has the emotional, historical force of knowledge: knowledge of language and of languages, with their unknowable measures of horror and redemption. — Robert Pinsky

Bostonia (February 18, 2020)

Th[is] collection, which won the 14th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, opens with a confession: ‘I couldn’t be a good Jew, so I tried / to be a good historian. I couldn’t be / a good historian, so I wrote poems’ (‘Confession (Invitation)’). One of the biggest challenges we face as poets is capturing the massiveness of our world, not just the present, but the intricate ancestral paths that led to it and our fears and wonders about the future. This job well done can be a poem that moves easily from line to line, century to century, continent to continent, like Hollander’s ‘Why I Don’t Do Genealogical Research.’ In eight brief stanzas, she finds words for the grief of an ancestry riddled with massacre, particularly of the children murdered during the Holocaust and many pogroms. She traverses the line between past and present, balancing on the tension between grief and comfort. The poem wanders through the imagined lives of the stolen children as statesmen, philanthropists, or even the poet’s own cats. Hollander conjures a silky dream world before ushering us to the painful reality of the last line: the children are ‘my own murdered kinspeople / plentiful enough as they have been.’ A journey of decades in only a few stanzas. ‘The Great War’ uses the same magic of time travel and ends with one of the strongest examples of Hollander’s use of music as a means to access pain—its presence and its inevitable return: ‘Come / in, they sing. Come in, come in. / And the dead come in, / dragging their next war behind them. It’s an ending that’s both disturbing and soothing, a lullaby reflecting the beauty and violence enmeshed in the pages of this book. Though My German Dictionary spans only 80 pages, that’s all Hollander needs to take readers on a journey through a century of wars, pressing questions of identity, and into what the future might hold. — Annette S. Frost