Convalescence Dance

<p>Alexandra Sashe is a bilingual poet. Born in Moscow in 1976 she studied paint­ing and linguistics. In her mid-twenties she moved to Paris and began to write: at first prose; then—as an essentialized way of living a language—poetry. The choice of language however was neither her mother tongue (which quickly reverted to rudiments) nor yet French (which penetrating ever deeper into her life would soon become her private medium of speech and her inner voice). Rather it was the Language itself that had made its choice as spontaneous as it seemed necessary: English.</p><p>In 2013 her first collection of poems <em>Antibodies</em> was published by Shearsman Books. Around the same time she moved to Austria and settled in Vienna. She dedicated the following years to studying German. Thanks to the distance from France the French language became insulated within the intimacy of her inner world: as a result she began to write poetry in French.</p><p>Formed through a successive influence of four languages and cultures she believes however that they come to neutralise each other. Today she names and summons her cultural identity—as well as her life—with only one word: Christian.</p>