Lather in Heaven

Poetry. Fiction. After the delicate first concept album I, Coleoptile (2010), Ann Cotten now comes out with a full-fledged book of English poetry and prose. LATHER IN HEAVEN assembles her work in English up to now, as well as some selected translations from the German. English, however, is a wide field. The author, known for stretching the limits of German expression, writes in an English informed more by several global variants of pidgin than by universities or writing schools. If it sounds like Shakespeare, it also sounds like slips from Chinese fortune cookies.The poems hail from various third- and first-world countries the author spent time in; the largest body of poems was written in Japan. Cotten's linguistic estrangement is both trauma and solace. In tune with her generation, she does not seem to feel bound to a single position. She will pound in the brutality of a postcolonialist reality only to create, in the next line, some bizarre fluff that flies off into speculative aesthetics. The topics may grasp at the personal and the general with one and the same phrase; misused rhetoric serves to aggravate the sensibility of the crass realities we live in with the startling trusting gestures of a domestic plant gone feral.The book is interspersed with fine black-and-white photography by the author. After the poems and songs, it includes four stories from Der schaudernde Fächer, Cotten's prize-winning German prose collection, and an interesting dialogic lecture on the evolution of art memes.