In a recent article in Novy Mir, the critic Dmitry Polishchuk writes: The 25-35-year-old generation is now experiencing an efflorescence--a new type of poetic vision, with a distinct poetic language, a new kind of baroque; with novel structures, combining the far-fetched, the heterogeneous, the incompatible, in a poetics of contrast. This is particularly true of women's writing, which transcends post-modernist or Western feminist tendencies. This collection looks not only at those living and working in Moscow or Petersburg, but also at those authors writing throughout the whole of Russia.

Valentina Polukhina (Emeritus Professor of Russian Literature, Keele University) is the leading Brodsky scholar in the West, and has edited four collections of poetry in translation.