Esther Kinsky's poems engage with our world through all the senses and delve into forgotten yet equally constitutive layers of language. With the mysterious sayings of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah open in hand and the penetrating sounds of Schubert's Winterreise in the ear, "Am kalten Hang" creates a strongly associative landscape of sorrow and pain. In contrast to these deeply moving constructs that touch the limits of mental integrity, there is a lyrical prose that continues beneath each poem. This represents a kind of microtextual Italian journey that, far from any cultural pretentiousness, reveals itself as a trek through the mountains into a sense of foreignness. Encounters with various regions between the Elbe and Olevano coalesce in correspondence with the poems into an intense and moving experience.