"Berlin Fresco" is the first volume in English by the German poet, translator, editor, and publisher, Norbert Hummelt. Born in the Rhineland in 1962, he has been a freelance writer since 1991, and editor of the literary-critical journal "Text+Kritik". He has taught at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig and at the Universitat der Kunste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. He has translated the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wordsworth and Inger Christensen, as well as Eliot's "Four Quartets" and "The Waste Land".

'I think the necessity of poetry is to irritate, to evoke the uncomfortable response. Scraps of language from different places and registers-radio, tv, conversations, lawyer-speak, etc. coalesce and collide, creating meaning from their juxtaposition, meaning that is not subject to control or definition but (among other things including just being what it is) questions the rules by which we are obliged to live, like grammar, syntax, meaning. Look in vain for (linear) narrative, for anecdote, for epiphanies, for messages, for making-the world-a-better-place: the world is a mess and language is messy and the world is language and any attempt to tidy it up with poetry is falsification. There is no utopian vision-utopias tend to end in concentration camps and piles of skulls. Putting the poem into something resembling conventional form is thus supremely ironic - (Catherine Hales). This book is the first full-length collection by Catherine Hales.