Poetry. Christian Hawkey's VENTRAKL folds poetry, prose, biography, translation practices, and photographic imagery into a ground-breaking collaboration with the 19th / early 20th century Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. What evolves is a candid and deeply felt portrait of two authors—one at the beginning of the 20th century, the other at the beginning of the 21st century, one living and one dead—wrestling with fundamental concerns: how we read texts and images, how we are influenced and authored by other writers, and how the practice of translation—including mistranslation—is a way to ornament and enrich the space between literature and life.

Author City: Brooklyn, NY USA

Christian Hawkey is the author of VENTRAKL (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), CITIZEN OF (Wave Books, 2007), Hour, Hour, a chapbook which includes drawings by the artist Ryan Mrowzowski (Delirium Press, 2006), and THE BOOK OF FUNNELS (Verse Press, 2004), winner of the 2006 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2006 he was given a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award and he has also received awards from the Poetry Fund and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and his work has recently been translated into German, Slovene, French, and Portuguese.

Reviews and Other Links
Karla Kelsey in The Constant Critic
Laird Hunt in Bookforum
A Year in Reading: Anne K. Yoder @ The Millions
Genevieve Kaplan @ Galatea Resurrects
Marjorie Perloff @ Los Angeles Review of Books
Ezekiel Black @ CutBank
Paul Legault @ Jacket2
Dan Rosenberg @ The Kenyon Review
David Kennedy @ Stride Magazine
Blake Butler @ HTMLGIANT