Paul Celan
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One of the great poets of the latter half of the 20th century, Celan was a Romanian Jew who survived the Holocaust. His poetry is a difficult and harrowing attempt to reckon with the lived experience of genocide. In a sense, many of his poems can be read as attempts to give voice to the bodiless dead: language itself is compressed and fragmented into gnostic observations, neologisms, and an intensely tragic personal symbolism, all of which seem... (read more)
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