ABOUT

RAINER J. HANSHE is a writer and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and the journal Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and the editor of Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth’s Fragments (2014). He is also the author of the hybrid entity Shattering the Muses (2016), Closing Melodies (2023), a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche and Van Gogh, Dionysos Speed (2024), and Humanimality (2025). Work of his has appeared in Po&sie, Ludions, Caesura, Sinn und Form, Asymptote, ChrisMarker.org, Black Sun Lit’s Vestiges, and elsewhere. In 2016, Petite Plaisance published an Italian translation of his second novel, The Abdication. Shorter and longer works of his have been translated into other languages, and in 2021, the journal Po&sie staged an event at Maison de la poésie in Paris to honor his work. His own translations include Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021), Évelyne Grossman’s The Creativity of the Crisis (2023), Antonin Artaud’s Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages (2024), and Léon-Paul Fargue’s High Solitude (2024) and The Stroller of Paris (2026). Beyond Sense, a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud, is due out in late 2026, as is Lithogenesis: A Choral Poetics of Accretion, Rupture, and Becoming. He is at work on several other books: Burn Poet Burn, The Radio of Thought, and The Edge of Language.