Explores the troubled relationship and unfinished intellectual dialogue between Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger. This book centers on the persistent ambivalence Celan, a Holocaust survivor, felt toward a thinker who respected him and promoted his poetry. It describes how the poet and the philosopher read and responded to each other's work.

In the first systematic analysis of the Celan and Heidegger's troubled relationship between 1951 and 1970, Lyon describes how the poet and the philosopher read and responded to each other's work throughout the period.