The 110 poems of A Visit to the Kafka Café are both a dialogue with and a questioning of the human condition as they hover between what the author sees as the absurd and the existential elements of life, making their way through the worldly and otherworldly aspects of existence, the ordinary and the extraordinary spheres of being. These poems investigate what it means to live in this world, to flee from it, to return by its emotional gravity. A Visit to the Kafka Café attempts to make sense out the way we conduct our lives, to find meaning in our not always meaningful surroundings, to look at individuals caught in time and space and history, and in the sometimes joyous, sometimes frightening yet endlessly fascinating moments of existence and being. Journeying through poems such as the collection’s opening poem, “A Visit to the Kafka Café” to “You Awake at the Beginning of Time” to “The End of Geography and Time” and the collection’s final poem, “Some Will Be,” in which the author asks “What will you be doing when the world ends / or threatens to end? / (Please excuse the not so subtle distinction.),” offering possible scenarios of our comings and goings at imagined world’s end, the 110 poems of A Visit to the Kafka Café invite the reader to join the writer in various states of being and an assortment of realities hovering between the absurd and the existential.

Poet, fiction writer, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published twenty-two books: two novels, Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (1987) and Word Burials (2009), thirteen short story collections—The Apostate's Tattoo (1983), Forms of Captivity and Escape (1988), Unmapped Dreams (1989), The Miraculous Hand and Other Stories (1991), Dancing at the Club Holocaust (1993), Disturbing Identities (1997), Should the Word Hell be Capitalized? (1999), Anton Chekhov was Never in Charlottetown (2000), Would You Hide Me? (2003), A Glass Shard and Memory (2010), Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (2015), An Unauthorized Biography of Being (2016), and Gregor Samsa Was Never in The Beatles (2019)—and seven poetry collections, An Affection for Precipices (2006), Misshapenness (2009), Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (2014), Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be (2017), A Visit to the Kafka Café (2018), Morning Bafflement and Timeless Puzzlement (2020), and Somewhat Absurd, Somehow Existential (2021).

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