Max Sessner was born in 1959 in Fürth, Germany. He lives with his wife in Augsburg and has worked as a bookseller, for the department of public health, and for the Augsburg public library. Sessner is the author of eight books of poetry including Das Wasser von Gestern (edition Azur, 2019), Warum Gerade Heute (Literaturverlag Droschl, 2012) and Küchen und Züge (Literaturverlag Droschl, 2005). Among other honors, he was awarded the 2019 Rotahorn Literary Prize.

Francesca Bell is a poet and translator. She is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound, (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her work appears in B O D Y, ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and Rattle. She is the former poetry editor of River Styx, the translation editor of Los Angeles Review, and the Marin County Poet Laureate. She lives with her family in Novato, California.

Books by Max Sessner:

Other poems on the web by Max Sessner (trans. Francesca Bell):
"In The Café"
Two poems
"It Is"
"A Dry Cleaners"
Four poems

About Whoever Drowned Here:

"Dreamlike is a place to begin, one of many inadequate ways I might speak of the poems of Max Sessner. Liquid is better, as his poems move like water and surprise me by revealing spaces between objects and people, between moods and moments that I didn't know existed. If this book were a house, it'd be on the edge of town and have a tree growing through its roof; a river, it'd know your name but never quite make it to the sea; a photo, the person you miss most would be in it but turned around and looking the other way. In searching for passages to quote that would give you a sense of the imagination and vitality of Sessner's work, its strangely touching warmth, I found it impossible to excise a portion of a poem without including the whole. Lifelike, then, is what I'll end with, or better yet, alive."
—Bob Hicok

"In Francesca Bell's nimble and swift translations, Max Sessner's poems come across from German into English with a deft sureness and dramatic delicacy. The wry, sometimes ironic, voice and point of view of these poems is also probing of the shadow mysteries that animate our everyday lives. Silence, loneliness, unsettled companionship, chaste assertion, and everywhere a sense of shifting depths—Sessner's poems observe what we miss, and ask us to look again. They are quietly confident about what they know, and what they offer is the kind of value we find only in real poems. I'm grateful to have them."
—Joshua Weiner