Poetry reading Eva Gerlach & Sasja Janssen

Eva Gerlach’s important position in the landscape of Dutch poetry is indisputable: the poet who made her debut in 1979 with her collection Verder geen leed (‘No Further Distress’), has won several prizes, including the P.C. Hooft Prize for her entire body of work. Her poems have been translated into fifteen languages. For many years, no one knew who the person was who wrote under the pseudonym Eva Gerlach, until Margaret Dijkstra was revealed as the author of the extraordinary poems that so fascinated readers. Eva Gerlach’s style is unique and instantly recognisable. In her poems she manages, in a sophisticated and almost clinical way to write about situations between people so that the underlying emotions become more real and more tangible. In the sometimes surreal poetic universe in which her characters find themselves, Gerlach plays with the reliability of observation and of her narrator. She also plays with language, her poems often including neologisms and language experiments. She writes about memory and loss, a loss that the reader cannot fail to feel. But her work also features a light and distinctive humour that lingers with the reader.

Sasja Janssen is a poet and author of novels and short stories. The body features in her poetry in many forms, from vehicle to target, and from weapon to wound. Her ability to make her often physical fascinations tangible unparalleled, as she condenses them into something that nestles in the body like a secret. After the success of her collections Ik trek mijn species aan (Putting On My Species, 2014, nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize) and Happy (2017), she is now causing a stir with Virgula (2021), for which she received the Awater Poetry Prize and has received nominations for this year's Herman de Coninck Prize and De Grote Poëzieprijs (Grand Poetry Prize) for best poetry collection of the year. This collection strikes an impressive balance between mystery and razor-sharp intent, with Janssen’s use of the comma (virgula in Latin) constantly causing shifts and contrasts in perspective. The boldness of this small intervention turns a little glitch into the tissue that connects interpretation and confusion; a tiny stumble in the ceaseless flow of life.