Maria Stepanova's poetics, at once contemporary and timeless, disproves the notion of a crisis in traditional prosody. She experiments with the authenticity of the author's utterance, applying personal idiosyncrasies to a poetic persona. For Stepanova, this is not merely a figure of speech but an act of personal will, an attempt to break through to the subject. Her poetic language is highly distinctive, deforming word forms on every level to reveal new senses, both actual and potential.
With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family managed to survive the twentieth century.