Author Description

Marina Tsvetaeva's political poems, a crucial part of her sensibility and life's work, have largely been neglected in English-language translation. Emphasized instead are poems she wrote about her tumultuous personal and romantic relationships, an emphasis that suggests a gendered reading of the poet as an extreme personality, rather than a poet responding to the extremity of her time. In fact, Tsvetaeva was deeply attuned to the political circumstances in which she lived, and she wrote extensively and incisively about them. To erase this part of the poet and her work domesticates and exotifies her and ignores her reality. At the Edge seeks to correct this misreading of Tsvetaeva's work by bringing together a selection of her political poems-many of them never before translated into English-at a moment in our own culture when they are acutely relevant.