R. Kolewe reading from Afterletters at the Fall 2014 Launch

In 1948, in the exhausted aftermath of WWII, the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann met in Vienna. They began a difficult and intense but intermittent relationship which lasted until the early 1960s, broken off only when Bachmann could no longer deal with Celan’s increasing mental instability. And yet, despite the break, the relationship continued to haunt both of them. In Afterletters, Kolewe weaves together fragments of letters and other works of these two poets, to give us a stunning sequence of poems that explore the traces of loss and love, in language that breaks, recombines and scintillates, “star-crossed, star-covered, star-thrown.”