Inna Krasnoper’s debut English-language poetry collection dis tanz is an unfolding space of movement and transition, tracing questions of identity, language, and belonging. These poems insist that communication is a process and ask for an active mode of reading and localizing oneself. dis tanz is a book that problematizes the gaps between languages, but also looks for points of contact, and the means for becoming proximate.

Here is a writer about whom the usual questions—What language does she write in? Where is she from?—cannot easily be answered. Her work brings to mind the humor of Ivan Blatný’s multilingual poems, Gertrude Stein’s play with repetition, John Cale’s “Cordoba” collaged from a Spanish-language primer, the vocab-poverty of Samuel Beckett, and the contemporary cross-language experimentation of Ida Börjel, Eugene Ostashevsky, Cia Rinne, and Uljana Wolf, to name a few. Migration, war, and the crises of nation-state and mother-tongue set the stage for Krasnoper’s uneasy dance of and with language, as waves of identity’s fetters crash against the shores of yet-undiscovered blue islets of a future Babel.

—Matvei Yankelevich, author of Dead Winter.

Format: Paperback
Published: USA, 2025
Publisher: Veliz Books
Pages: 92
Language: English
ISBN 10: 1949776204
ISBN 13: 9781949776201