The Body Returns

Even before the international success of her first work of prose, Post-Memory, Maria Stepanova was a famous author. For twenty years, she has been contributing to shaping Moscow’s open-minded literary scene and established a reputation as a productive, adventurous poet, even in the English-speaking world.

The three long poems of the present volume, a work of memory in darkening times, follow in the tradition of the Russian and the American poetics of Modernity.

»Poetry, this absurd, many-eyed / creature with the many mouths / Lives in many bodies at once, / Went through many bodies before.« Stepanova lets poetry appear as an acting figure: We hear and see it striding across the battle fields of the 20th century, puts its ear to the ground, digs up the soil that received the bodies of the dead. A broken world is visited and there is someone who collects, picks up all the pieces – »reads« them and assembles them anew. A messianic project? Maria Stepanova is concerned with the political, the poetic and the erotic dimension of bodies – and that all of them, both the dead and the alive, claim the same right: being seen, being perceived by us.

»Once more, Stepanova acts as a poetic archaeologist: She exposes what has been buried, visits ruins, puts back together the things the 20th century left behind on its battlefields, in the hope that the irretrievable might return. A great, almost utopian project that the author launches with abandoned linguistic force and by mobilising her incredible literacy.« Ilma Rakusa, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»There are many impressive passages in which Stepanova strings together individual lines that seem like the captions in old photo albums.« Christiane Pöhlmann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»visionary poems« Der Tagesspiegel (Books of the Year 2020)

»... profound, enlightening and amusing at the same time.« Marie Luise Knott, Deutschlandfunk

»[The poems] express an outlook onto the world that is informed by the experience of violence and at the same time charged with mythological and intertextual allusions: dead poets that served as role models; wars and the victims they claimed. The style oscillates between elegy and irony, between sarcasm and exaltation.« SWR (#1 Best of the Month List, January 2021)

»In her volume of poetry The Body Returns, poet Maria Stepanova expresses Russian history in impressive polyphony. Lament and requiem takes turns with cool sarcasm and ambiguous irony.« Michael Braun, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

»As a poet, Stepanova picks the words up in her hands, marvels at them and makes something new with them.« Sieglinde Geisel, SRF

»Literature of greatest astuteness and humanity.« Natascha Freundel, NDR

»Stepanova is a poet. With a weightless wand she transforms thoughts into images and vice versa.« Barbara Villiger Heilig, Republik

»It is completely justified to call Maria Stepanova an author of world literature.« Jonis Hartmann, Fixpoetry