In the morning we are glass by Andra Schwarz

Translated from German by Caroline Wilcox Reul

Andra Schwarz’s probing, unpunctuated poems take us into her native Lusatia, a region in Eastern Germany near the Polish and Czech borders that has undergone drastic changes from coal mining, politics, and demographic shifts. Her work addresses loss, nature, displacement, marginalization, and memory from personal and collective perspectives. In the forests and hillsides, she explores her roots in exquisite language, even as she mourns that “no one comes back this way.”

Andra Schwarz was born in 1982 in Upper Lusatia in Saxony, Germany and currently lives in Leipzig where she studied creative writing at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut. She won the Open Mike Lyric Prize in 2015 and the Leonce and Lena Prize in 2017. She was awarded a residency at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin in 2018 and a grant by the Kulturstiftung Sachsen in 2019. Her debut collection of poetry, Am morgen sind wir aus glas (Leipzig: Poetladen), was published in 2017. Her work has also appeared in Maulkorb, Ostragehege, L – der Literaturbote, Jahrbuch der Lyrik, and others.

Caroline Wilcox Reul's translations have appeared in the PEN Poetry Series, Lunch Ticket, The Los Angeles Review, Exchanges, Waxwing, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Columbia Journal, and other publications. In addition to In the morning we are glass, she translated the book, Who Lives / Wer lebt, by Elisabeth Borchers (Tavern Books, 2017). She was awarded the Summer/Fall 2018 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation and Multilingual Texts.