Introduction. “Speaking in Voices”: On Maria Stepanova’s Literary Creation
Journal: Columbia University Press eBooks
Year: 2021

Occupying oneself with poetry presumes a chain of greater and lesser deaths, each putting in doubt the possibility of continued existence. Poems move forward in gigantic leaps, rip themselves loose from familiar and fertile soil, rejecting (shaking off) the very soil they were only just clinging to. Poetry seems to preserve itself by way of disruptions, renouncing what only a moment ago comprised an inalienable part of it, and sometimes its very essence. " Maria Stepanova, "Displaced Person"