Dr. Jennifer Hoyer, associate professor of German, offers the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed prewar poetry and prose in her book, "The Space of Words." Hoyer also offers the first hand analysis that examines structural and thematic ties between the prewar works and the Nobel Prize-winning postwar poetry.

Through close readings of both Sachs's prewar and postwar works, she reveals a diasporic rather than exilic conception of the landscape of language, a position of constant wandering rather than static longing for return.

This diasporic poet promotes the intellectual linguistic power of the wanderer and opens new insights into Sachs's essential significance as a Holocaust poet and a twentieth-century German-Jewish writer wary of the link of literary language to geopolitics and the narrative of nations.