Michael Augustin: How It Goes

In Michael Augustin’s chapbook, How it Goes, we learn, from the dead in a Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi, how we might live together without strife. How one use for an anthology of love poems might be to kill a fly. Augustin, in this short collection of his own self-translations from the original German (alongside those of Sujata Bhatt), even laughs at the art of translation itself. This heavy humor, however, belies a deeper understanding of the fleeting nature of life and poetry, drawing unexpected, stark parallels between them. These short, aphoristic poems land as if with a blow of the author’s hand, on a table where we sit across from him, perhaps for a game of chess (or what remains of it!).

What the critics say

“Michael Augustin delivers a rare treat: comic poetry that isn’t reliant on performance or rhyme to raise a genuine laugh.”
—The Guardian (UK)

“Each of Michael Augustin's poetic subtleties contains equal measures of attitude, precise observation, economy of words, and plenty of northern German humor. And that is always more than the anemic, dry, but much-discussed poetry of some of the critics‘ darlings has to offer.“

—DAS GEDICHT  (Germany)

“His wry wit and verbal acrobatics, the many bizarre events occurring in his prose pieces and short plays, and the precision and startling comic twists in the last lines of his poems and haiku, place him firmly in the court of the comic muse. In Augustin’s world the absurdities and the Gordian knots of existence are neatly unravelled with surprising nimbleness and with laughter.”
—Poetry Ireland Review

“There is much humour, and much that is ironic. Augustin's Weltanschauung can be bleak but there is much that is hilarious and even charming in its dotty logic. Augustin often returns to questions of identity and existential doubt and reminds us again and again that places, people and events are ambiguous and plastic: concrete and fixed only so long as we think they are and, at that, different for each observer.“
—Envoi (UK)