“Daniela Danz has long been counted among the most important poets in Germany.”—SWR Kultur Radio

“As a poet, Daniela Danz is an explorer. Her poems illuminate unknown territories; they are excursions into geographically uncharted distances, into regions of striking earnestness, poems of great analytical power.”—Durs Grünbein, winner of the Georg Büchner Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize

“Not about romanticized shipwrecks or simply about the cunning and crude business of global commerce, Portolan by Daniela Danz charts the seafaring provenance of the things that build our lives while navigating the fossilized terrain of interiority as it becomes soft and wet again in the wake of faithful feelings. The sure and exacting hand of the translator, Monika Cassel, brings this ship of ancient longing closer to ‘the lions of the unknown.’”—Dong Li, author of The Orange Tree and translator in residence at Princeton University

“Portolan leaves land maps behind and takes us far out to sea. There we find trade routes busy with the mechanisms of capital and the conflict, pollution, and instrumentalization that come with them. But the poems offer us immersion in both the literal and metaphorical sense: a journey through what is below the surface. Poetry from Homer to Hölderlin, history, art, myth, a kind of religious mysticism, the little lives and losses of the everyday. Part ecological outcry, part ecstatic submersion, this is a dense poetry that works with repetition and sound. Sometimes dancing, sometimes creating new forms, or congealing into immersive blocks, it is always in search of connection. Monika Cassel has taken us into the heart of this struggle, with translations that follow Danz’s feints and forms to the letter but manage also to sing. A singular voice in German now available to an English readership.”—Karen Leeder, Oxford University, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Schlegel-Tieck Prize

“In Portolan, Daniela Danz’s English language debut, the rich lyric language draws a new map, one in which shipping containers replace ships, illuminating how our lines of connection—political, historical, and personal—are pressurized by our endlessly commodified world. Whether through dense unpunctuated paragraphs or more clipped lyric songs, all readily available to the English reader through Monika Cassel’s impeccable translation, the immensity of Danz’s intellect is utterly clear, a delight to read. ‘Oh my beautifully filled blooming fading head,’ writes Danz, and yes, yes, I agree.”—Sally Keith, author of Two of Everything and River House and a Guggenheim Fellow

“Danz’s sovereignly written and sophisticated book of poems goes in search of voices that are often unheard—flora as well as fauna, and, especially, the voice of our conscience, which we still perceive all too faintly.”—Björn Hayer, Frankfurter Rundschau