Acrimony touches on personal and political watersheds and examines various kinds of patrimony. It is characterized by a drastic honesty, and rhythmic force.

Michael Hofmann was born in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, and came to England in 1961. He has published four volumes of poems and won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for poetry. His translations have won many awards, including the Independent's Foreign Fiction Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the P.E.N./Book of the Month Club Translation Prize. His reviews and criticism are gathered in Behind the Lines (2001). Ashes for Breakfast - his translations of the poetry of Durs Grunbein - appeared in 2005, and his Selected Poems was published in 2008.