‘A shawl as long as a thousand and one nights / Scheherazade goes for a walk’ – Volkmar Mühleis plays with our imagination in hundreds of ways. Stories are hinted at, dazzling miniatures emerge.

With poetic turns of phrase, images and scenes, Volkmar Mühleis creates a kaleidoscope of constantly new beginnings, associations, cross-connections and contrasts in four sections. In the process, the self-evident is broken up, language is explored and modified in its scope – in shifts of context, reversals of familiar metaphors, in the undermining of everyday ways of speaking. “Born from a guitar riff / he stood on the street, / in full possession of his powers”, it says, while elsewhere the “erotic feather play” is sung about or a “garden gnome with a mohawk” appears. In this way, a sequence of disparate, sidelong glances, reflections, incidences and ideas is casually created. The sections are framed and rhythmically organised by drawings by the Belgian artist Jean-François Pirson, in which he deepens the distance to his own hand in a physical and imaginary way.

Der Abstand zur eigenen Hand (The distance to one’s own hand)

2024, Passagen Verlag, Vienna

96 pages, 13 EUR