This is not a biography in the usual sense. It is not a linear telling of a life, nor is it a scholarly essay written at arm’s length. This book is a descent. A close reading of a body of work that refuses to be polite. A collaboration between two voices one that lived it, and one that now shapes it. Baron von Sachsen is not just a poet. He is a witness, a wanderer, a composer of shadows. His life threads through deserts and metropolises, through jazz clubs in Tokyo, dives in Spain, through addiction, ecstasy, collapse, and the long, slow crawl back toward language. His poems are not decorations. They are eruptions. This book explores four intertwined paths: 1. Selected sonnets of the first 5 crowns of Duende sonnet cycles forged in the Spanish tradition, metaphysical, erotic, apocalyptic. 2. Selected chapters from Love, Lust & Despair the surreal cities of feeling, the cathedrals of want, the robots of touch. 3. The poet’s life told through autobiographical poems and fragments, woven directly into the fabric of analysis. 4. An Addendum with a dissertation on the book. Each section speaks to the others. The sonnets are dissected with care not to sterilise them, but to expose their anatomy, their bones, their screams. The free verse is mapped against the landscapes of memory. And the life is not presented as context, but as the source the pulse the storm that made the writing necessary. The British spelling is used throughout, in deference to the European roots of the poet’s journey. But the tone is not academic. It is intimate, precise, and unapologetically poetic. We speak as readers, lovers, ghosts. We read these poems the way you read an old wound: slowly, knowing what you’ll find, yet flinching all the same. This is a book for those who believe poetry should burn. For those who have been undone and want to know how to survive the page. It is the story of one man but more than that, it is the anatomy of duende, lust, ruin, and the written word. Théodore Balthazar Renn, Editor in Chief, the European Poetic Dispatch