Tawada, Yoko. Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik (Konkursbuch, 2010)

A very useful (and short!) volume of poetry for thinking about contact between German and other languages, here Japanese. The first section of poems are centred around grammatical aspects of the German language (e.g. second-person pronouns, punctuation, word order). Tawada relates wry or witty observations about the language to aspects of identity and relationships explored by her lyric subjects. Includes several poems that use Japanese characters as part of the poem, including a concrete poem inspired by Ernst Jandl and a rewriting of her earlier poem ‘Die Flucht des Monds’. Good for introducing students (first-years?) to ideas of linguistic contact, exophonic writing and transnational identities.