The Angle of Sharpest Ascending

The Angle of Sharpest Ascending, co-winner of the Yellowglen Prize, is a haunting suite of poetic sequences about the German dimension of World War II and the ways it touches our modern experience. As Ingrid Wendt writes in the book's preface, "I also believe in the importance--for the future safety of our country, our world--of trying to understand how perpetrators of violence can do violence to themselves, can be victims of wrong teaching, of mass hysteria, of propaganda. To recognize that evil can be taught." These masterful poems--a number which take the form of an artistic collaboration with the photographer Ingeborg Kolar, the painter Traude Linhardt, and the sculptor Susi Rosenberg--touch on essential questions of memory, responsibility, and healing.