Tamara Štajner’s contemporary art seeks to bridge European literature and interdisciplinary performance art, which we could call ‘acoustic poetry,’ that focuses on physicality, texture and breath via acoustic language. With her chapbook ‘Loophole’ her words have reached the English-speaking poetry world. Born in Slovenia, now based in Vienna, Štajner holds a Master’s in concert viola from the University of Music and Performing Arts (Vienna).  She is author of the collections Luft nach unten (2026) and Raupenfell / Goseničji kožuh (2023 / 2026) and outside of the page, Štajner creates performance where she exhibits live improvisational viola alongside readings of her poems. In Loopholes this musical heritage is felt in the sparsity but refined precision of Štajner’s lower-case languaging:

where searching ends

at night the pineforest

smells a distant joy

tastes a vague sorrow (porto ii)

Translated from German to English by Rebecca Weingart and published in America by Toad Press, this 21-page chapbook collection is an English selection taken from Štajner’s original German language poetry collection, Schlupflöcher. (2022) originally published by German press, Verlag Das Wunderhorn. The essence behind Štajner’s chapbook performs both from a deeply personal level and a broader political context in its ultimate messaging.  The choice of title represents the varied ways one can escape, or create an opening or possible ambiguous outcome, that feels both raw and considered but also a lot like sheet music:

a stranger a

a sticker in the slime primalstate a

a corpuscle out of mine +

another corpuscle a (ii)

There are three primary threads throughout; beginning with what contradictions exist in the process of becoming a mother and bearing children? This necessarily leads to a feminist deconstruction (of languages construction) and the claiming journey to find safety and wholeness within the experience of becoming a mother. The chapbook, whilst not containing all the poetry of the original, has at its literal core, the ‘loopholes’ poems, which explore concepts of motherhood, often in a limbic, repetitious song-esque chant. “+ want you + / + want you not + / + want you not + / + want you +” Asking, for example, how we understand holding another life within us? What is shared in that process? Is it okay to have doubts?  Štajner relates this oft smothered tension through revealing the balancing act women experience, in seeking their autonomy, whilst connecting with the primal concept of carrying another life within themselves. Štajner refuses saccharine versions of motherhood in favor of a visceral revealing, that evidences both the potential intimate joy of motherhood, alongside its ability to destabilize one’s sense of self and demand beyond capacity. This is housed within a greater landscape of being removed from one’s origins in language and location

not far the home my

rootland next door fewer

hours away

than an afternoon there

three times stairs (Krško)

This leads to a wider discussion of imagining loopholes as metaphor for the navigation through stereotypes of motherhood as experienced by modern women. Relating in particular to abortion access becoming restricted where there is a relevancy to bodily autonomy and choice that is the core of the body politic. Considerations beyond motherhood to include the surveillance and control of a woman’s body. Štajner’s feminist voice in her poetry, breaks down the internal and exterior lived experience of motherhood, which lead into the third element of Loopholes, that of location and history, how loopholes can be the places we go when the glaze gets exhausting. Alongside other immigrants, Štajner considers how we hold memories of specific landscapes, both in our bodies and without. Where trauma rubs shoulders with the displacement of immigration, as transformative prosody.

we lie for the last time before each

other    a chalkoutline at the crime scene on

the edge of the womb you on the

screen I on the table big (i)

Štajner joins and reworks the tradition of translating sound into language. Not entirely ekphrastic (art responding to art), but an equal authenticity in its actual cadence and linguistic shaping, where she builds an architecture of chords in language through modulation and flow, structuring poetry like actual music, for example where syncopated rhythms, act like a call-and-response manifesto, or that musical communication babies comprehend before language. In the tradition of fellow poet Joy Harjo and her saxophone, both poets’ approach language and their music as partners.  Music and language becoming intertwined, with both relying on auditory growth to build emotion. Consonants and vowels resemble instruments; anaphora and alliteration emphasize and shape movement, with hard consonants sounding sharp, percussion, whilst long vowels form a more resonant, tonetic legato.

+ grave after grave here

a rose garden

where the dead’s roses

bloomed or urns

in life within a kissed

often another one + (tulips welcome)

With Štajner’s training as a professional violist, she employs in her language a form of resonance through sound, where poetry’s rhythm and acoustics are employed to echo sounds within the physical body. There is a persistent genre of poetry centered around maternity, to include the marriage of sonic elements with the physicality of pregnancy, such as Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Morning Song’ or German poet Mara-Daria Cojocaru’s philosophical examination of motherhood through an eco-feminist perspective, where she speaks to the primal aspects of birth and caretaking and its ability to bond and reduce one to primal statehood. Štajner’s poetry here has that redolent musical background, where auditory and metronomic language consciously track her experience in an emotive double helix:

your being begins in

my being

your being my

being our

being + otherwise (ix)

One’s instrument then becomes the emotional gap which language is unable to fill, but its seeking is the sound of pushing through, which mirrors one’s experience of becoming a mother and its contradictory resulting identities. The transitioning from sound, to the child and back again, where vowels fall and rise, mirrors pregnancies awakening soundtrack.  Emilie Buchwald’s ‘My Mother’s Music’ focused similarly on music with the depiction of a mother playing the piano influencing her child, but Štajner’s language becomes the music, washing into the body. With both poets; music can also become metaphor for safety, a lamp to shore, a guiding light where a mother’s body and presence, is the shore. The sound flowing and rushing, in acoustic soundscapes and rhythms and deliberate musical play, where music finally inhabits the body completely;

he steps in dark-

blue velvet box

 by the opening of a hand

adorned vase

for you (wedding day)

Tamara Štajner, born in Novo mesto (Slovenia), is a musician and author, based in Vienna, Austria. She received her Masters in Viola at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. She is a sought-after soloist and plays in multiple established ensembles. Tamara’s performance art has been presented at the Viennese MuseumsQuartier, the Secession, the Kunstraum Niederösterreich, OstLicht, and Vienna Art Week. She has led workshops at institutions including Williams College, the Private University for Music and Art in Vienna, and the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz. She received multiple fellowships from the Federal Ministry of Art and Culture, including the annual literature scholarship (2026). In 2020, she was admitted to the “Junge Akademie” of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. Her first book of poetry, Schlupflöcher, was published in 2022 by Wunderhorn, followed by her narrative debut, Raupenfell, in 2023. In 2024, she won the Meran Poetry Prize and read at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, where she was awarded the Kelag Prize for her text Luft nach unten. In spring 2026, her Slovenian debut novel Goseničji kožuh was published by Beletrina. Her novel Luft nach unten is forthcoming from Paul Zsolnay Verlag in autumn 2026.

Translator Rebecca Weingart is a translator from the Midwest. Her translations have appeared in Pakn Treger, Hopkins Review, Harvard Review, and Grotto Journal and have received support from the Yiddish Book Center, the American Literary Translators Association, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.