This original anthology traces a century of Russian poetry, taking us through the turbulent decades from 1900 to 2000 with poets of stature who reflected or recorded their times. It combines work by famous and lesser known (outside Russia) poets, some never previously published in English, through the medium of six translators, who also contribute biographical and historical notes. The one unnamed poet is the writer from the Arsenal Mental Prison Hospital in the 1970s, whose anguished, affecting verse, in a little book bound in elastoplast, was smuggled out of the hospital. These are poems that will continue to survive. The named poets are:

Mikhail Kuzmin
Velimir Khlebnikov
Osip Mandelstam
Boris Poplavsky
Daniel Andreyev
Arseny Tarkovsky
Leonid Aronzon
Viktor Krivulin
Katia Kapovich

The translators are:

Vladimir Baskayev
Kitty Hunter Blair
Belinda Cooke
Richard McKane
Michael Molnar