Fantastical, eerie, mysterious and penetrating poems, whose needles descend right into the reader’s core.

Poetry

The poems/stories in the spiky collection The Needle Descends draw on world literature and several European languages including Czech, German and Slovak. The speaker/observer, who takes the form of a precise pathologist, an insane woman with a strange deadly disease and a charming child who likes playing with insects, produces poetry with richly imaginative, vivid images which are razor-sharp despite not building up to a neat conclusion, and at the same time are mysterious, fantastical and compellingly odd.

Wanda Heinrichová (1968) is a poet, translator and German teacher. She studied medicine for a few semesters but eventually graduated in German language and culture from Charles University. From February 2010 to December 2013 she edited the review section of the literary fortnightly magazine Tvar. In 2011 she published the poetry collection Nalomenou (Cracked). Together with Ivan Wernisch she edited the anthology Nejlepší české básně 2013 (The Best Czech Poetry of 2013). Her poems have been translated into English, French, Italian and German. An anthology of her poetry was published in France with the title Suis-je bien couverte? (2017) in a translation by Petr Král. Her latest poetry collection is the book Jehla sestupuje (The Needle Descends, 2018).