a matter of life or death

A frequent contributor to After Hours magazine, Siegfried Mortkowitz was born in Germany to Holocaust survivors and moved to New York City at the age of nine. He worked as a bartender, short-order cook, telephone salesman, dishwasher, grocery store clerk, construction worker, sawmill flunky, book slave at the Strand Bookstore, book editor and professional journalist at Newsweek, the German news agency dpa and POLITICO Europe. He has lived in Europe since 1987.

Although he began writing poetry in high school, he did not devote himself seriously to the art until shortly after the birth of his son, Sasha, when he was fifty-six and poetry began to feel like a matter of life or death. He is the author of a chapbook, Eating Brains, also published by After Hours Press, and has had work published in several magazines, including After Hours, BODY and Brown’s Window. He is grateful to these publications for supporting his work even when he was writing in the dark, as he sometimes still is.

From Michael Blumenthal, Former Director of the Harvard Creative Writing Program and author of CORRECTING THE WORLD: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, 1980-2024 and the novel WEINSTOCK AMONG THE DYING

“Being human was much too hard,” writes Siegfried Mortkowitz in his poem “My Epitaph,” “Please let me come back/As a cat.” Reading this sad, funny, lustful, irony-filled, wonderful book of poems, one comes to fully understand this wish. But if, as Wallace Stevens said, sentimentality is “failed feeling,” there is nothing whatsoever “failed” about the feelings contained in these remarkably honest, and sometimes (but never without a certain gallows humor) heartbreaking, poems. Rather, the feelings they so artfully embody ring utterly true, because they are so filled with rage, tenderness, longing, lust, ambivalence, regret and, yes, wonder, that the authenticity of what they feel and express is utterly beyond doubt. It takes courage to write a book like this, and it takes a certain amount of toughness and openness – not to illusion, but to true feeling – to read it. But it is a journey well worth making.

Available for pre-orders, publication date November 15, 2025

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