Documentary Poetry

Author: Heimrad Bäcker

Translator: Patrick Greaney

Publisher: Winter Editions (2024)

A prominent member of the Austrian avant-garde, Bäcker devoted decades to the development of a singular documentary style. For most of his adult life, Bäcker directed a publishing house for avant-garde literature, collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photos of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria’s largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The essays collected here for the first time in any language systematize his thinking about documentary poetry and photography and their relationship to history and memory.