TUCSONICS: Poetry Reading with Max Kade Writer-in-Residence Nika Pfeifer

The German Department was pleased to present Dr. Nika Pfeifer and her students from GERM 323, reading her work in both German and English.

In her new poetry collection TUCSONICS, there is a great sensitivity for language. Nika Pfeifer moves between realistic and fantastic perceptions of nature and the world. The title is a portmanteau word (in German: Kofferwort) or blend of the name “Tucson,” a city in the US state of Arizona, and “sonic,” another word for sound.

The combination of both words refers to the fact that Nika Pfeifer has explored the sounds of the US city and its surroundings, and has incorporated her observations into her poems. Mountains, canyons, the vast expanses of the Arizona desert, and the Pacific coast of California also form the multi-layered themes of her poems.

In Pfeifer’s poems, tones also signify color, visuals, concentration, or vastness: a play on words and images is at times concrete, other times mixed with a few dashes of pathos.

Judith Nika Pfeifer is a writer, sound and visual poet, and performer. She studied political science, communications, and contemporary history (Vienna/Pavia) and has her PhD in Discourse Analysis (Lancaster/Vienna 2017). Currently she works as a writer, poet, and sound artist with matthaei&konsorten, Milena Kipfmüller and Ö1 Kunstradio. Her latest publications are TUCSONICS (hochroth 2019) and Violante (Czernin 2017).