PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksBrecht’s poetry is so little known in the United States that the mere existence of a body of work that fills over 1,300 pages may come as a shock. With many poems appearing in English for the first time, translators Kuhn and Constantine offer English speakers an indispensable resource into the intellect and soul of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers ... If the current volume sacrifices a feeling of clandestine, dangerous contraband compact enough to smuggle over the border, the extraordinary depth and comprehensiveness make the trade-off worth it. The collection can almost serve double duty as a poetry collection and a biography of the writer. The chronological ordering of the poems and the succinct and superb introductions by the editors take us on the journey of Brecht’s life ... In the impossible struggle translators of poetry face between content and style, Kuhn and Constantine always favor the former — which necessarily means at the expense of the latter ... But this shortcoming should not take too much away from the tremendous value of this collection — instead, this collection is a necessary starting place for what will hopefully be a long history of translations of Brecht’s poems into English (Kuhn and Constantine even admit to this aspiration in their introduction).\
