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The Dance of the Bees

Paul Demets

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

Simply trusted quality
Awater
The Flemish poet and critic Paul Demets is known for his rich imagery and sharp reflections on contemporary society. Following ‘The Clover Knot’ (2018), for which he was awarded the Jan Campert prize in 2019, and ‘The Hare Distress Call’ (2020), Demets explores familiar subjects in ‘The Dance of the Bees’ without being repetitive.

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Hunger, Heteronormativity & The Galaxy

Lies Gallez

Poetry
Experimental

She constantly questions our common norms, in short: a successful debut.
Awater
‘Hunger, Heteronormativity & The Galaxy’ (2023) is Lies Gallez’s poetry debut, published two years after her successful short story collection ‘Catching the water’ (2021). Gallez presents a personal yet critical reflection on conventional values in three sections, corresponding to the three words in the collection’s title. In each section, our glimpse into the speaker’s world expands, starting with individuality in ‘Hunger’, moving to relationships in ‘Heteronormativity’, and ending with the speaker’s place in society in ‘The Galaxy’.

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Wake

Kurt De Boodt

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

This plea for freedom and imagination deserves attentive readers
Poëziekrant
For Kurt De Boodt poetry is word art. He sees every collection as a new exploration. His poems are especially loved by readers who love the richness of the Dutch language and the sounds it can evoke, readers who know to embrace the language plays the poet enfolds in every poem.

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No Man's Land Night

Annemarie Estor

Poetry
Experimental

Unsettling poetry that fascinates by its stupefying sensuous power
De Standaard
'No Man's Land Night' is not really a whodunnit, but the main character's quest for an answer to the question ‘Where do I come from?’ triggers an adventurous story full of surprises and inventive associations. Annemarie Estor depicts and critiques a dystopian world that is magical and exotic, but at the same time terrifyingly recognizable.

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Choir

Peter Verhelst

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

A monument, in the oeuvre of Verhelst as well as in the history of poetry
De Standaard
‘Choir’ is the first anthology of poems Peter Verhelst selected himself out of published and unpublished works. This new context forced Verhelst not only to change the chronological order, but often also to a rewriting of several poems.

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The Best of Delphine Lecompte

Delphine Lecompte

Poetry
Experimental
Performance

Her universe is peopled by characters and situations which brutally burst into your imagination and remain there to haunt your dreams when you are wide awake.
Jury Report VSB Poetry Prize
Delphine Lecompte’s poetry creates an extraordinary universe, peopled with characters of highly diverse plumage. The poems are self and family portraits, which, like mirrors at a funfair, magnify the poet’s world into mythological dimensions and associations and reduce it to personal dramas. Full of unusual trains of thought, they seem most like lucid ravings.

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Light Meters

Ruth Lasters

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

Ruth Lasters operates with a pair of silver scissors, filleting modern society affectionately, but uncompromisingly.
Jury Report VISB Prize
She connects a football game to the way our brain works, and flashing neon lights remind her of her own futility. Ruth Laster's poetry is characterized by playful leaps of the mind, yet they are never banal. Lasters employs language as a magnifying glass: she twists reality to see with a crystal-clear vision, against the loss of wonder, and for the gusto of discovery.

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Now is Already too Late

Erik Spinoy

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

A poet like no other.
NRC Handelsblad
Erik Spinoy constructs his collections with great care, dividing them meticulously into sections and cycles that reinforce his treatment of themes. He rediscovers himself time and again, like a snake shedding its skin. His book ‘Now is Already too Late’ is no different in this respect, and at the same time it is.

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We Are Parallel

Maud Vanhauwaert

Poetry
Experimental
Performance

Her wonder on existence becomes the wonder of the reader
Jury Report VSB Poetry Prize
Maud Vanhauwaert already had won her spurs on the stage before notably debuting as a poet with her collection ‘Ik ben mogelijk’ (I am possible). ‘Wij zijn evenwijdig’ is a complex collection that at a closer look gets more and more coherent, using rhetorical strategies that easily seduce the reader. Reader and poet, walking parallel, touch each other in infiniteness.

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Home

Geert Buelens

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

Buelens writes a forthright terroristic poetry, although with still carefulness and subtility
Jeroen Mettes
‘Home’ investigates what makes us feel at home. Is it a place, a feeling, a language, a wireless connection or a carefully cultivated illusion? At first sight his poetry appears to be difficult, and while it can hardly be called simple, it is never uncomprehensible. Rather, it links the quest for the appropriate linguistic structure with the everyday struggle of the lyrical protagonist.

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Our Desire

Paul Bogaert

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

Witty and vilainous
De Groene Amsterdammer
A chilling display of all the things people do to each other. Bogaert is not only one of the most modern but also one of the most interesting poets writing at the moment, one who gets under your skin rather than remaining at a distance, on paper.

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The Trip to Inframundo

Peter Holvoet-Hanssen

Poetry
Experimental
Performance

The wizard of love and downfall
Knack
In ‘The Trip to Inframundo’ (2011) Peter Holvoet-Hanssen presents a challenging selection of poems taken from these five collections, and by altering the original chronology and combining poems in new ways he constructs a completely fresh collection in which he follows trails that emerge before fading away

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Something & Nothing

Mark Insingel

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

Insingel’s language has the grim structure of a machinery, but when carefully read that machinery displays emotions
NRC Handelsblad
Language is at the heart of Mark Insingel’s oeuvre. His writing is based on an idiosyncratic, creative relationship with existing forms of expression such as slogans, traditional proverbs and idiomatic phrases, which he undermines and in his unique way playfully and unexpectedly combines in varying settings to eke out new meanings.

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There Is a Tall Sky Above Us

Els Moors

Poetry
Experimental
Performance

This is an extremely accurate and haunting collection of poems.
Jury Report Herman de Coninck Prize
In the poems of Moors’ debut collection ‘There is a tall sky above us’, a rather peculiar ‘I’ communicates ongoing amazement about a rather peculiar world. Undoubtedly the strong compositional aspect and the equally strong, provocative nature of her work are partly why these poems have already been deemed classics of the twenty-first century and Moors one of the rising stars of Flemish poetry.

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Poems 1948-2004

Hugo Claus

Poetry
Classic
Experimental

Impressive, many-voiced poetry, generous, rich, unhampered by conventions of fashion or good taste
Jury VSB Poetry Prize
Although Claus is a stirring eclectic who displays a masterful variety of genre and style in all his activities, the basic theme of his work is clearly the urge for freedom, which must be fought for in family, church and society. Claus’ work addresses not only the malaise in society, but also inner unease.

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Affairs of the Heart

Dirk van Bastelaere

Poetry
Experimental
Self-reflexive

Van Bastelaere provokes, menaces and seduces, curses and sings, but ceaselessly knows to fascinate his reader, to tangle him in his web of words
Ons Erfdeel
‘Affairs of the Heart’ is generally acknowledged as Van Bastelaere's best and richest work to date. In this collection, the heart appears as an empty signifier which is accorded another meaning in every poem and is shown as a cultural construction.

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Collected Poems (1942-1972)

Albert Bontridder

Poetry
Experimental

Each poem attests to a supreme form of living – even in failure
Tom Van Inschoot
Acutely aware of the destructive power of time, Bontridder does not set an ethical or aesthetic example to his audience. Rather, he holds a broken mirror up to them, creating a reflection in which the poet and reader rebel against their powerlessness.

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The East Acre Poems

Hugo Claus

Poetry
Classic
Experimental

Distinctly innovating poetry resulting in a whirling reading experience
Literaire Canon
Using old myths of fertility described by Frazer, biblical and Christian references and literary quotations, Claus evokes a mythical and fatal family constellation in which the mother, the father, the son and the beloved play roles that are alternately driven by desire and love, but also by fear and hatred. Definitely one of the highpoints in his oeuvre.

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Occupied City

Paul van Ostaijen

Poetry
Classic
Experimental

A milestone of modernist poetry
Embedded in a fragmentary atmospheric sketch of life in the port of Antwerp during World War I, ‘Occupied City’ is first and foremost a settling of accounts with the bourgeois culture and politics of Ostaijen’s period. The Dadaist influence from his time in Berlin can be found in its inventive rhythmical typography, its use of the collage technique, and the radicalism of its unparalleled cynical evocation of wartime suffering.

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