Härte

Author: Sade LaNay

Publisher: Downstate Legacies (2018)

Sade LaNay's Härte is a straightforward and deliberate book of questions that—through generative translation and transceptual writing—cajoles readers to reconsider what can be gleaned from the brevity of innocuous interrogation. The follow up to their acclaimed debut Dream Machine, LaNay's Härte is a poetic sequence, a deft and edgy snare, risking everything to replicate linguistically the Sehnsucht survivors of trauma embody. Imbued with flecks of doubt, guilt, antagonism, and estranged desire, Härte evokes the friction of language against language, interpretation versus misinterpretation, what one heard with what was said—how a perpetrator lingers and forces a survivor to define the borderland—perhaps the only heartland left to inhabit.