One of the greatest poets to ever write in German and among the most indispensable writers of the twentieth century in any language, Paul Celan's poems "embody a conviction that the truth of what has been broken and torn must be told with a jagged grace" (Robert Pinsky, The New Republic). The essential poet of the Holocaust-a Jewish survivor writing in the language of his mortal enemy-Celan spent his creative life prodding language and disrupting syntax. His exquisitely distilled poems are manifestations of a primal agitation-each one a cry of human anguish in the face of incomprehensible suffering.