Redshift

It's nothing short of stunning what Bernd Sauermann can create in less than a hundred words. Do not ask whether these are poems or small fictions. They are sui generis and they are universal. They are human life captured elegantly and vividly and deeply. Redshift is a remarkable book by a splendid young writer.-Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Bernd Sauermann's newest poetry collection, Redshift, is at once a love letter and a lament: to lives and loves, current and past, as well as to time itself. Delicate yet potent, these precision-cut prose miniatures cull the archetypical trappings of an array of timeless every-days, from the pastoral to the post-industrial, the temperate to the tropical; but all are suffused with the eponymous blush created by the relentless ebb of experience itself. In quietly stunning lines that "break the morning like a dropped glass of water" we are shown the melancholy beauty of a world in which "the years have no pulse, and weeks are silent as light." In the tradition of all great literature, "[t]ime thrusts its shadow" on these hauntingly beautiful poems, which gently but wisely ease us to our knees "at the altar of a moment."-Susan Lewis, This Visit Redshift occurs as a result of light's lengthening wavelength - if it made a sound, it would thrum at a lower frequency that only a few could hear. But Bernd Sauermann's listening for us, and he's filed a report that's filled with locomotives and typhoons and cracked teeth and burnt-out volcanoes. In Sauermann's new book of poems, there is a recognition of, and a resignation to, the tyranny of time - not the melancholic's lament, but the clear-eyed adult's exaltation at life lived on its own maddening terms.-Michael Kelsay, Too Close to Call