Amanda DeMarco is an American writer, translator, editor, and publisher based in Berlin. She translates from German and French and has worked across literary criticism, independent publishing, and contemporary European literature. Her Issue 39 poem It Was a Lot of ‘He Said, She Said.’ moves through childhood, collecting, animals, toys, language, domestic objects, travel, and philosophical doubt by way of rapid associative shifts.
The poem’s movement resembles a cabinet of curiosities. An inflatable donkey, a horse’s eye, a shell containing a pearl, miniature roosters, a terrarium, algae, oatmeal, and the German word Fernweh enter a sequence in which ordinary objects become arguments about sameness, belief, desire, memory, and the human condition.
Collecting and variation
Collecting gives the poem one of its central structures. Objects resemble one another closely enough to form a category while remaining different enough to sustain attention. Miniatures, toys, shells, plants, and repeated forms turn the pleasure of classification into a question about how people organize the world.
This balance between repetition and difference connects with poetic forms, where recurrence, sequence, variation, and constraint can organize meaning without requiring a continuous narrative.
Childhood detail and knowledge
Children in the poem encounter the world through details. Their attention remains close to surfaces, objects, sounds, and immediate distinctions. Adult interpretation enters later, bringing abstraction, ideology, nostalgia, and contradiction.
The tension gives the poem much of its humor and unease. A toy can become a model of the world; a child’s attachment can expose adult sentimentality; a household collection can open into a meditation on sameness and obsession.
German language and translation
DeMarco’s life as a translator appears naturally beside the poem’s interest in German expressions and cultural comparison. Fernweh becomes a small test of how one language carries an emotional category that another language may approach from a different direction.
For another writer whose poetry makes linguistic crossing central to form, readers can continue to Uljana Wolf, whose work moves among German, English, translation, migration, and wordplay.
Objects and associative movement
The poem advances by juxtaposition. One observation releases another: an animal leads to a toy, a toy to collecting, collecting to childhood, childhood to theology, a terrarium to distance, and a German phrase to the feeling of elsewhere. The links remain emotional and conceptual as much as narrative.
Readers interested in collage, associative structure, found cultural material, and abrupt changes of register can continue through experimental poetry.
Editing, publishing, and Berlin
DeMarco founded Readux Books and edited Readux: Reading in Berlin, creating an English-language context for literature connected with Berlin and European writing. Her translation work includes authors writing in German and French, while her criticism and essays have appeared in major literary and cultural publications.
This combination of writing, translating, editing, and publishing places her within a wider field of contemporary poets and writers whose literary practice includes the creation of contexts in which other books and voices can circulate.
Further reading
Les Fugitives documents DeMarco’s translation, criticism, grants, and fellowships. The Believer records her editorial work in Berlin, while Scribe Publications provides additional translator biography.