Traumatic Verses

Close readings of -- and the stories behind -- poems that are direct documents of the Holocaust. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Christianstadt, Dachau. The names of Nazi concentration camps evoke images of radical destitution. The atrocities we call the Holocaust defy comprehension, while thinkers continue to ponder the possibility of "poetry after Auschwitz." And yet a number of people composed poems while imprisoned in the camps. Unlike most documents about the camps, these poems are self-representati