Anja Utler

Anja Utler

Anja Utler (born 1973 Schwandorf) is an exceptional talent of the younger German-speaking poetry scene. Her poems – at the heart of which is the shifting relation between body and voice, breath and memory – draw their tension from contradictions: they are sparing and sensuous, considered and playful. The poet Thomas Kling spoke of “calm images which lend themselves out to body and nature”. Utler’s texts come into being in proximity to music, they are poetic braces, in which some passages are set parallel to one another; a virtuous dialogue in the type area, which finds its correspondence in a plurivocal performance. Writing is, for Utler, always a shaking of the world, which is made visible and audible as a deformation on the body of language. In her poem “jana, vermacht” (jana, bequeathed), which is about repressed memories, she illustrates this through a process of silencing, in which she erases the initial vowels. It is a staging of the “words up to the limits of the sayable. Speech stumbles and breaks – but still Utler creates a completely new world, a world made of language” (Stuttgarter Zeitung).

Publications (selected)

münden – entzüngeln, Edition Korrespondenzen 2004
brinnen, Edition Korrespondenzen 2006
jana, vermacht, Edition Korrespondenzen 2009
ausgeübt. Eine Kurskorrektur, Edition Korrespondenzen 2011