Siljarosa Schletterer is a multi-awarded Austrian poet from Innsbruck, where she leads writing workshops and co-organizes the international poetry festival W:ORTE. We spoke about the sizes of poetry shelves in Slovenia and Austria, and about her deep fascination with rivers. In her first poetry collection, flussdiktate, rivers are at the heart of her work, appearing through GPS coordinates that mark the exact places where she encounters them. We talked about why she finds them so compelling and why they hold such importance in her life. Given her background in musicology, I wondered how she sees the relation between poetry and music. Her second collection, körperkantate, even carries a musical form in its name with the prevalent themes dealing with shame, the body and intimacy. We discussed how language, as a societal force, shapes these often taboo and personal questions. Is shame culture-specific? Is it a Catholic thing? Why do we handle the body with so much shame, and why do we shame our sexuality? What is the role of erotic poetry here: can it be instrumental in addressing this shame, or can it be liberating? And ultimately, how can shame be transformed into courage? She says that we don’t really have a language that cherishes the body. Even the most intimate words, sometimes taken from medical vocabulary, are stylistically burdened. Siljarosa Schletterer (1991) is an Austrian poet living and working in Innsbruck. She leads writing workshops and is a co-organizer of the international poetry festival W:ORTE. She has received several awards and scholarships, including the Major Poetry Grant of the State of Tyrol and the Literature Recognition Award from the University of Innsbruck (GroßesLiteraturstipendium des Landes Tirol in der Sparte Lyrik, Literatur-Anerkennungspreis der Universität Innsbruck). She has published two poetry collections to date: azur ton nähe. flussdiktate (2022) and entschämungen. körperkantate (2025).