A bilingual edition selected and translated by Francis Booth

Along with Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, Else Lasker-Schüler was one of the most important German-Jewish poets of the twentieth century. And along with August Stramm and Georg Trakl, one of the most important early German Expressionist poets.

Born into a middle-class banking family in 1869, Lasker-Schüler began writing poetry very early, imagining herself as a child living in the Orient. Later she lived a bohemian life in Berlin, where she moved to train as an artist in 1894. Else later married the artist Georg Lewin, who founded the seminal Expressionist magazine Der Sturm, which published much of her early work.

Lasker-Schüler embraced political activism in favour of animal rights, artists' rights and Jewish causes. Although not explicitly a feminist, she advocated and used "gender-just" grammar. Else lived in Berlin until 1933, when she fled Nazi persecution, finally settling in Jerusalem where she lived a life of poverty and eccentricity until she died in 1945.

The German text in this edition is presented as a near-facsimile of the 1917 edition of her Collected Poems, from which these verses are selected.