It's the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracized by his peers and finds solace in the company of nature, collectin...

"Porcelain" is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grunbein's hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at...