Unser täglich Gift

The title carries its own bitter irony: "Our Daily Poison" twisted from the Lord's Prayer into something far more honest. Otfried Krzyzanowski wandered the Viennese coffeehouses as a Lebenskünstler, a life artist who let the city carry him between its literary circles. But the wandering ended in 1918, when he died in poverty, worn to nothing by hunger. This collection appeared the year after his death, and it reads like a man with nothing left to lose speaking plainly about having nothing at all. The poems are raw, unadorned, stripped of any aesthetic comfort. They face hunger, bodily misery, and the precarity of existence without flinching. This is not polished Symbolist beauty. It is the real thing, a voice from beneath the glittering surface of Viennese modernism, demanding to be heard.