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.

PRAISE FOR DIS TANZ

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

Inna Krasnoper’s material, rhythmic, punning, and playful dis tanz is a true work of translingual and transnational poetry. It plunges us into the environment of its language the way a nightclub plunges us into the environment of its music. Its columns of parallelisms connect words by sound and estrange their sense. Its unsettled English unsettles English. What’s it like to be a person without a country? This is what it’s like. 

—Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Feeling Sonnets

The acrobatic dalliance of Inna Krasnoper’s dis tanz will “now you” into the withness of linguistic encounter—a here-there between “any one and any other.” Heady repetition, with inexact glosses between English, Russian, French, and German, enacts an endless “umzug” of the speaker’s interlingual situation. With cheeky temerity, “she and her stunt double” render authoritarian orders—narrative, linguistic, temporal, or sociopolitical—absurd in a Chto-Delat-inflected, Pussy-Riot-styled exhibition. What appears as anarchic rupture I am “up to my ears in” is a mode of reaching across distances for relationship: “there is this liking,” letter to letter, a fatiguing but necessary effort for a multilingual speaker dedicated to questions of be/longing. This book entices us to “be long” here, reach back, and “bare with me / bear with me” the aporia of our crossings.

—Leah Nieboer, author of Soft Apocalypse

ABOUT THE POET

Inna Krasnoper is a poet, artist, and literary translator born in Ufa (Bashqortostan) and based in Berlin. She graduated from the Chto Delat Collective School of Engaged Art in Saint Petersburg and holds a BA in Dance, Context, Choreography from University of the Arts in Berlin. Her Russophone poetry collections include Нитки торчат (Loose Threads), published by the Voznesensky Center in 2021, and Дорогой человек (Dear Person), published by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie in 2024. Her English-language poetry has appeared in her chapbooks Over Sight (Eulalia Books, 2024) and Sealed (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2024), as well as in Annulet, Black Sun Lit, Ghost Proposal, Poetry Daily, Pocket Samovar, Oversound, SAND, 128 LIT, TILT, and elsewhere. dis tanz is Krasnoper’s first full-length poetry collection.