Wirz’s poems have been published in French, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, but it took ten years for his first novel to be published in English, and now the publication of this companion volume of poems is made possible only by recent changes in the publishing world—-the rise of e-books and desktop publishing—that have made it far easier and more cost–effective to publish literature in a minor key. But this volume, though small, is not minor. It’s poetry that speaks to all of us.

“Mario Wirz published poems, wrote and staged plays as early as the 1980s, but he became famous in the early 1990s when his book It’s Late, I Can’t Breathe – A Nocturnal Report was published. It told about a gay actor diagnosed HIV positive who found a language for fear and the desperate will to live. He was actually talking about himself. AIDS, therapy and the complications became his literary drive, and the background for stories and several volumes of poetry. For Mario Wirz, literature was a cure and a drug at the same time. ‘As long as I can write,’ he wrote, ‘death has no power over me.”