Michel Houellebecq's poetry is marked by the horror of life's repetitions and is directed towards the moment: poems that resemble song lyrics. They can be read as a single large parlando - autobiographical, confessional, and effortless. Between the sobering experience of daily awakening and the predictable longings of the night, they recognize the unstoppable approach to an end: "Houellebecq makes the monstrous and global lack palpable everywhere," wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The paperback edition of the collected poems now unites all poetry volumes for the first time, including the 2014 release 'Gestalt des letzten Ufers'.