Styx

By Else Lasker-Schüler and Mildred Faintly

Else Lasker-Schüler’s first book, Styx, is a psychedelic tour of the late Symbolist/early Expressionist imagination. Erotic, optimistic, exuberant, she paints the free-love eastern-mysticism infused world of the German soul before World War One, when Berlin was still a small town bohemia. Her poetic impasto is as urgent as Van Gogh’s, her rainbow-colored visions as pleasing and cheerful as those of Peter Max.