Week 11: Monika Rinck's "To Refrain from Embracing" (2011)

After the poetry of Philip Metres with its focus on Russia, and Caroline Bergvall's multi-cultural background, we stay in the European sphere with our next poet, Germany's Monika Rinck. Like Nicole Brossard, and unlike the rest of our poets, Rinck's another author whose foreign-language work we'll be reading through the frame of a translator. In this case, it's UK-born Nicholas Grindell, and our volume, 2011's To Refrain from Embracing (Burning Deck) is the poet's first English-language collection.

Born in 1969, Rinck spent her early years studying comparative literature and religion, both in Germany and the US, and these preoccupations are evident in To Refrain from Embracing (which takes its title from Ecclesiastes), where the texts are peppered with sly allusions to both high-minded literary texts and pop cultural touchstones. Her work can be highly personal at times, all the while engaging in surrealistic, dream-like imagery and confounding turns of phrase.

Here's our schedule for To Refrain from Embracing:

• Tues., November 4: "ways of cheering you up" and "what about the animals"
• Thurs., November 6: "counter-constellations" to "vaguer complaint"

And here are some supplemental links:

• Aditi Machado reviews the book in Asymptote
• Steven J. Fowler reviews the book on his blog
• Amanda DeMarco considers Nicholas Grindell's translation
• a profile of Rinck via Poetry International Rotterdam