Berlin Poetry Festival 2026: Ann Cotten

As part of its decentralized program, the festival will also feature events at the Academy of Arts on Pentecost Sunday. Poets Esther Kinsky, Ann Cotten, and Anne Carson will read from their works and participate in discussions. The program opens with the multi-award-winning writer and translator Esther Kinsky. Her work is characterized by an intense engagement with landscape, history, and memory. She is followed by Ann Cotten, who is considered one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry and who will present her recently published poetry collection *Poller. Idyllen*.

In the evening, Canadian poet Anne Carson will read live in Berlin for the first time in 20 years. Her work is particularly connected to this year’s festival themes, as myth, mourning, and an engagement with canonical traditions repeatedly intersect within it.

Starting June 2, the festival will be centered at silent green in Berlin-Wedding, where, in addition to major thematic evenings, numerous other readings and discussions, “Weltklang – Night of Poetry” featuring seven international poets, and the Berlin Speech on Poetry will take place.

Poller. Idyllen

Book Launch with Ann

Cotten“A bollard is a protective structure against imagined dangers, but at the same time an obstacle to the assumption that one could simply cross invisible boundaries anywhere.” –

In Poller.Idyllen (Suhrkamp Verlag 2026), Ann Cotten (born 1982 in Ames, USA) brings poems like bollards into view. They direct our gaze toward what we might prefer to overlook in our beautiful late-capitalist world—for example, those whose invisible labor ensures the comfort of everyone else.

The book’s title refers to Theocritus’s bucolic idylls, which idealize the simple rural life of shepherds and—even in their later forms extending into realism—seek to conceal the precarious conditions of the working class within idyllic depictions and suggest a harmonious balance. The Bollard Idylls, on the other hand, lay bare the imbalances of the globalized world and position themselves within the political sphere. Cotten compares the idylls to the “babbling of a gushing fire hydrant opened by mischief or chance,” which washes up “all the heavy metals, stupidities, and lies of our societies, along with the drastic situations regarding the income gap, social policy, and climate.”

Beneath the Bollard Poems, a horizon line runs through all the chapters of the volume; below it, everything is “Natureingang,” as the notes state. These are texts written since 2009 and recycled into a conceptual breeding ground in which the bollards stand firm: “Because you are so powerful, so full of brutal potential to run things over, we stand here to remind you of your destructive potential and to ask you to rein yourself in.”

Following this: Ann Cotten in conversation with Bertram Reinecke

IN GERMAN