Rarely has documentary poetry been so stark or so relevant. Heimrad Bäcker’s appropriated language is irrefutable in its presentation of realities that any other approach would soften. His reflections on historical utterances are apt for thinking about the distortions of reality proliferating in our current moment. This short collection sinks into consciousness with terrifying force and provides a wake-up call for anyone engaged in poetic or linguistic practice—which is all of us.
—Johanna Drucker

At the vanishing point of the Viennese avant-garde, Heimrad Bäcker produced some of the most enigmatic texts of conceptual writing by amplifying the dynamics between the concrete and the abstract, the ephemeral and the remnant, the decontextualized and the historicizeable, witness and participation, quotation and ventriloquism, what cannot be depicted and what cannot be avoided. Bringing together Bäcker’s essays, along with related works, and an interview, Patrick Greaney has, with one stroke, lent readers a guiding hand and issued a stern challenge.
—Craig Dworkin

Bäcker’s rigorous attachment to his sources systematizes a poetics where others systematized crime. His poetry of the detritus, of the rubble, of the remains of history, crumbles the unspeakable to reveal the monumentality of the horror in the language of “the final solution.” What Victor Klemperer analyzed, Bäcker puts into practice in the form of an austere, sharp, and even dry, but tremendously moving poetry. Bäcker’s reflections, which do not avoid delving into the acts of his own past, could not be timelier today when the dialectic of victim and victimizer takes on unexpected edges, and where the fragility of memory confronts us with a bitter crossroads.
—Carlos Soto Román

Heimad Bäcker negates negation (in Jean Amèry’s fateful phrase) in a sublimely futile attempt to cancel the uncancellable historic catastrophe. His concretizing texts and photographs actively turn on his participation, as a young Austrian, in the annihilation of the European Jews. Documentary Poetry presents a small selection from a lifelong practice of witnessing witness (Celan’s phrase). Backer painstakingly—and repeatedly—samples, fragments, slashes, echoes, and reconstellates short piercing details from Nazi documents: metonymy as elegy and epitaph. His work brings to mind, also, Hodell, Gomringer, Heißenbüttel, and Reznikoff, with debts to Arendt and Hilberg.
—Charles Bernstein

This is an interesting collection, and a good introduction to and overview of Bäcker’s fascinating life-project. Numerous photographs — all by Bäcker — complement the texts and Bäcker’s approach as well.

—M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review

Translated and edited by Patrick Greaney, Documentary Poetry offers a generous introduction of Bäcker’s work to an English-speaking audience, joining a growing conversation about the role of poetry in how we remember, how we write history, and how we speak the future into existence.

—Fani Avramopoulou, Asymptote

Bäcker’s work stands as a lesson—that it is not the avant-garde and its self-conscious acts of de-familiarization and the all-too-formulaic commitment to “the subversion of normativity” that is the work of the writer. Instead, attention to the instrumental violence of familiar language might be what is most urgent.

—Johanna Drucker, JD: ABCs

Bäcker’s com­pi­la­tion of pic­tures and words is a valu­able, if chal­leng­ing, addi­tion to the archive of Holo­caust literature.

—Stephanie Bar­bé Hammer, Jewish Book Council