Dear friends,

I’ve said before that we want ONLY POEMS to be of the world, not just of the English-speaking corner of it. Our readers write to us from everywhere, our poets live everywhere, and yet this is the first time we’re featuring a Poet of the Week who writes primarily in a language that is not English. Daniela Danz writes in German, and she’s our first featured poet in translation.

I’ve been working on a book of prayers for almost two years and have been looking for poems like hers since I first read Leonard Cohen’s Book of Mercy: austere, devotional, and still entirely of our moment as it is of every moment in history & the future. When Monika Cassel, her translator, sent them my way, it was one of those rare pleasures where you read something and immediately want everyone you love to read it too. Monika is brilliant & also one of the kindest people I’ve had the joy of working with. She translated not only the poems but also our whole conversation, which turned into a three-way exchange I’ll be thinking about for a long time. Please read her answers on translating as closely as Daniela’s.

And if you’re in New York in February: Daniela is coming to the US for the first time to launch Portolan. She & Monika will be at the Goethe-Institut on February 4, and then at UGA, Emory, and the University of Florida. Follow The Georgia Review for details. Go there and make us jealous, or just give them our regards in person. I so wish we could be there.

I’m also proud of being able to figure out how to acknowledge the translator properly on the site, as well as include the original German without the reader having to struggle too much. I hope this is one step closer to our ideal of publishing more and more translated poetry. Really, we’d love to do much more of this. If you’re a poet writing in a language other than English, or a translator bringing someone’s work into English, we welcome your submissions wholeheartedly. We already run a translated poem every Friday on ONLY POEMS DAILY, and starting today you can send us your translations here. Suggestions of poets you think the English-speaking world should know are just as welcome.

All good things,

​Karan​

Poet of the Week

Daniela Danz

translated from the German by Monika Cassel

Daniela Danz was born in East Germany in 1976. She studied art history and German literature and holds a doctorate in art history. She currently directs the national youth program Demokratisch Handeln and serves as vice president of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Danz writes poetry, fiction, essays and opera libretti. Her recent books include Wildniß (2020), Nichts ersetzt den Blick ins Gelände (2023), and Portolan (2025). Her work has received numerous honors, among them the German Prize for Nature Writing and the German Language Prize. She is a recipient of Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit.

Poems translated by Monika Cassel.

Monika Cassel is the author of Long Line (forthcoming 2027, The Word Works) and translator of Portolan by Daniela Danz (forthcoming January 2027, University of Nebraska Press). She received the 2024 John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

from First Charterhouse

Dear Brother sew a cloak for my impatience

Lieber Bruder nähe meiner Ungeduld einen Überwurf

Learn to Cast Shadows Into the Dark

On emptiness, attention, & a book that reads the world from the sea

Emptiness, for me, is a state of openness. It arises there where the things that we usually surround ourselves with lose their self-evidence: property, certainties, also the idea of a fixed ‘I.’ In this emptiness we can begin to find the possibility to perceive something else. Read the full interview →

The official $3500 Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize is now open for submissions! → Send us three pages of poetry on the intersections of love, faith & sex.