Book launch: Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism

Please join us in celebrating the publication of Simone Stirner's new book Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism (Fordham University Press, 2026),  recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. 

Bringing together phenomenologically informed close readings and historical-political analysis, Poetic Grief considers how poetry can affect embodied experiences through rhythm and breath, how its complex semantic patterns can collapse epistemic certainty and upend the flow of time—like grief does. New readings of poets familiar to the context of Holocaust remembrance such as Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Charlotte Delbo, and Irena Klepfisz appear alongside analyses of poets remembering National Socialism at different historical moments, including May Ayim, Audre Lorde, Ghayath Almadhoun, and Max Czollek. In their poetry, reading becomes an act of participating in relations that the book’s respective chapters describe as “withness,” “ongoingness,” and “solidarities of grief”—modes of answering to and being with loss.