A personal perspective on the challenges of living through a global pandemic.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Michael Krüger was suffering from severe shingles and just beginning treatment for leukemia. Because his immune system was so compromised that even a cough would have knocked him flat, he had to stay away from people. He retired to a wooden house near Lake Starnberg in Germany, and from there he dispatched his poetic messages. Krüger’s meditations from quarantine were printed for many months in the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and met with an enthusiastic response. In a Cabin, in the Woods collects fifty tableaux of nature, images of the immediate surroundings of a restricted life that also look beyond the horizon. At the same time, these poems look inward to explore transience, illness, and death. Humorous and melancholy, these are studies of the world made with the tiniest compass—meditations on nature and the nature of self that touch us all.

"“There is something peculiar about these poems: one settles in, becomes addicted to them. . . . Presumably this addictiveness is due to the apparent effortlessness with which Krüger formulates—and his ability to develop astute reflections from even the smallest incidents.”" - Der Tagesspiegel

"“Krüger’s poems connect two spheres that are very ephemeral in their own way and at the same time, precisely in this ephemeral way, they pose a comforting support: the birds on the one hand as the singers among the animals and the poets on the other hand as the singers among the people. Michael Krüger bows to both.”" - Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"“With attention and humility, respect and poetic mastery, with sadness and joie de vivre, humor and tragic resignation at the same time. The texts draw you into the lyric cosmos of Michael Krüger. No chance of escape.”" - Münchner Merkur

"“[Seasonal Time Change] presents almost exclusively short poems in which the beauty and iniquities of nature often mirror the unvarnished ironies of human endeavor, and is an accessible, excellent introduction to Kruger’s poetry for an American readership. Most poems in Seasonal Time Change are well under a page, precise in image, deft, witty, and wryly jaundiced in their view of the poet’s world caught between a desultory urban idyll and nature’s unsentimental image.”" - Rain Taxi