War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s first full English-language collection. Stepanova is one of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, and founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. Immensely high-profile in Russia for many years, recognition in the West has followed the publication of her documentary novel In Memory of Memory , first in German translation in 2018 and now with Sasha Dugdale's English translation – published by New Directions in the US – longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.  War of the Beasts and the Animals includes her recent long poems of conflict ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and Animals’, written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem ‘The Body Returns’, commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova’s assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary. This collection also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky : sequences of ‘weird’ ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma.  Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music. 'Stepanova's poetry is porous. Were it a fabric, it would be complete with rents through which darkness - and truth - might leak... Stepanova is a powerhouse. Her scornful wit is bracing and, throughout, the reader is on a switchback: you never know what waits around the next bend.' - Kate Kellaway, The Observer, Poetry Book of the Month(on War of the Beasts and the Animals) 'Like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, Stepanova allows a multitude of voices to speak through her lines... Poetry and the study of literature have potential to open borders between the living and the dead, and between cultures; to speak "as if respect, compassion, goodness have not lost their their meaning".' - Rachel Polonsky, Times Literary Supplement 'Stepanova has long been a major force in Russian literature and now, with Sasha Dugdale’s translations of her prose, the International Booker-shortlisted In Memory of Memory, and poetry, War of the Beasts and the Animals, Anglophone readers are finally catching up.' – Tom Jeffreys, The Guardian '... Dugdale has channelled a force of nature into English. War of the Beasts and the Animals is pure energy, dynamic and unstoppable, a call to protest by an emotional archivist. Entrenched in mythology and folksong, supported by research with a political message, with Tolstoy, Mayakovski, Whitman, and T.S. Eliot simmering below, what arises is a swirling collage of images that scroll past lightning fast with the reader left crawling around on the floor looking their lost dropped jaw... If you want to relive that moment when you first discovered Akhmatova, Ginsberg, Angelou, Silverstein, or Plath―that sense of inner revolution, that lift of possibility, that melody which keeps evil away―read Stepanova, because the next generations will.' - D M O'Connor, RHINO Poetry 'This is the year of Maria Stepanova. A translated collection of her long, densely allusive, political poems, War of the Beasts and the Animals, was published in March to much acclaim... Her poems...have the immediacy and intimacy of a photograph, brought to life by the intensity of her language.' - Aviva Dautch, Jewish Renaissance 'The collection opens with two long poems; 'Spolia' and 'War of the Beasts and the Animals'. Similar in form, they are both chaotic and deeply layered. In both poems, Stepanova sifts through language, culture and identity in an attempt to make sense of them all. She reaches no conclusions, but something fascinating is revealed in the attempt. In her poetry, Russia is a country torn apart and remade line by line, a patchwork of truth, myth and dogma stitched together with shreds of memory.' --Ellie Julings, DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts) '...2021 is the year of Stepanova: in addition to In Memory of Memory, her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals, and a collection of essays and poems titled The Voice Over, will also be published in English this year... Stepanova's poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals was written in 2014 and 2015, during Russia's conflict with Ukraine... What emerges is another archive of sorts, a home for language's