A deeply moving poem about winter and exile, war and the pandemic from “Russia’s greatest living poet” ( Poetry ) and the acclaimed author of In Memory of Memory The outbreak of Covid-19 cut short Maria Stepanova’s 2020 stay in Cambridge. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor―the world had withdrawn from her, time had “gone numb.” When she awoke from this state, she began to read Ovid, and the shock of the pandemic dissolved into the voices and metaphors of a transformative, epochal experience. Her book-length poem Holy Winter , written in a frenzy of poetic inspiration, speaks of winter and war, of banishment and exile, of social isolation and existential abandonment. Stepanova finds sublime imagery for the process of falling silent, interweaving love letters and travelogues, Chinese verse and Danish fairy tales into a polyphonic evocation of frozen time and its slow thawing. As a poet and essayist, Stepanova was a highly influential figure for many years in Moscow’s cosmopolitan literary scene until it was strangled by Putin, along with civil liberties and dissent. Like Joseph Brodsky before her, she has mastered modern poetry’s rich repertoire of forms and moves effortlessly between the languages and traditions of Russian, European, and transatlantic literature, potently yet subtly creating a voice like no other. Her poetry, which here echoes verses by Pushkin and Lermontov, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, is not hermetic. She takes in and incorporates the confusing signals from social networks and the media, opening herself up to the voices of kindred poets like Sylvia Plath, Inger Christensen, and Anne Carson. "Wildly experimental, and yet movingly traditional. Ironic, and yet obsessed with spell-making. Full of allusions to various different canonical voices, and yet heart-wrenchingly direct. What, friends, is this? It’s that glorious thing: the poetry of Maria Stepanova." ― Ilya Kaminsky "Like T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, Stepanova allows a multitude of voices to speak through her lines." ― Rachel Polonsky, Times Literary Supplement "The moving, polyvocal latest from Stepanova ( War of the Beasts and the Animals ) is a book-length snowscape sequence that blends voices of fracture and love, evoking Ovid in exile and other historical touchstones, from Baron Munchausen to Hans Christian Andersen. Bound together by a gently thoughtful steeliness, these poetic utterances are at once plaintive and resolute." ― Publishers Weekly ""Stepanova is one of the most celebrated Russian poets of her generation and a prominent critic of the Putin regime since the 2010s. She is known for intellectual density and formal virtuosity, often resurrecting archaic verse forms and engaging with historical memory in contemporary Russophone spheres."" ― Venya Gushchin, Full Stop ""One and the same with the poetry she writes, Stepanova reminds us that words always carry the weight of history on their shoulders."" ― Lora Maslenitsyna, Public Books "There are magic wardrobes, serpents, arrows made of ice, angry gods and heroes, war camps, Northern Lights, ghosts. It’s about Covid, and it came out of Covid, but it’s not just Covid. It’s life in Russia... The book forces you to feel it, to process, to pay attention." ― Cecilia Smith, Rhino Reviews Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, Maria Stepanova is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her poetry collections Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and winners of PEN Translates awards, and War of the Beasts and the Animals was also shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. Her novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English in Sasha Dugdale's translation. She was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory , and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.   Maria Stepanova has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In 2022 she was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for a book of poetry, Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes) . She founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile. Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is  The Strongbox , published by Carcanet (UK) in 2024.  Deformations  (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem