Cornelia Hülmbauer

Cornelia Hülmbauer writes poetry, short prose and radio plays. Her poems are emotionally charged, with sentences that seek the precise words to express something intangible, and generally ominous. Searching language, simple, featuring dialect and references to folk songs and counting rhymes; her sentences appear mainly to show how difficult it is to say things accurately. This is a serious task when it comes to the gulf between remembering and forgetting, or the harm people do to each other. Often, an ‘I’ will address a ‘you’ in a conversation that hints at wider engagement, like the imbalance in male-female relations. A fine example of this is the series Zyklus V, which is above all about the female body in the social space, and about the female voice in our society. Poems are often set in families, a context that is comforting, but is also infected by secrets and domestic violence. Threat combined with cool humour make for work that is multi-layered and full of surprises.