The Closed Space

A literary expedition with Jan Wagner: passionate, engaging and clever.

If you were unaware of Jan Wagner’s poetry, you would only ever want to read his essays, which are clever, entertaining and enlightening for the mind and soul.

How reassuring it is that Jan Wagner, as far as we know, has not committed himself to dark forces, but to literature – because the seduction of his concentrated, elegant texts is enormous.
Whether he writes about libraries, bookstores, poetry or art, whether he sends literary postcards from Rome or Los Angeles or celebrates the epiphany of rosemary in a Swabian Garden, we believe everything this charming storyteller tells us. There’s hardly time to admire the rhetorical dexterity with which Jan Wagner pulls surprising anecdotes from his sleeve in a confident, erudite fashion; nor can we help marvelling at his findings on explorations of epochs and continents. Each of his texts is marked by an infectious enthusiasm for the world of language.