On Quiet Nights

Book excerpt: There's a place inside us that is cloaked in darkness, rubbed raw with silence. It's a shadow wrapped in a shadow and it screams, but it screams in harsh whispers. This collection explores the blackness within, the gritty underground that hides inside memories and cowers just outside fear. The poems, paired with illustrations from Matthias Matthies work in sync to create a collage of blunt sexuality, masochistic, and sometimes sadistic recollections of love, reflection, and self-exploration. Lindemann paints pictures with his poems, a slave to the vulnerability and sexuality that drives mankind. His words themselves are body modifications that settle on readers, piercing then slowly penetrating and pumping his audience full with a mix of pleasure and pain. A combination of longing, emotional depth, and bestial intuition, these pieces evoke an innate nature to seek pleasure, to ask for forgiveness, to instill blame. "On Quiet Nights" pulls back the curtains at night and asks readers to think about who they are. Lindemann holds a mirror to soul, capturing desire and need, with the courage to answer some of life's biggest questions: "Who am I? What am I? Why am I?"