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, her reputation has lagged behind in the West, but with the 2021 Fitzcarraldo publication of her prize-winning documentary novel In Memory of Memory and her new poetry collection from Bloodaxe this is sure to change. 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...