Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature.

This review focuses on Ainsley Morse’s book *Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature*, which examines the development of a childlike aesthetic in Russophone avant-garde poetry from the 1910s through the post-Soviet period. Morse traces how playful language, nonsense (zaum'), and nonstandard orthography shaped both children’s literature and experimental adult poetry, highlighting the blurred boundaries between these genres in Soviet culture. The book analyzes key figures from prerevolutionary Futurists to unofficial Soviet poets of the 1960s–1980s and explores how this aesthetic evolved to express themes of powerlessness and social critique. Morse’s study also includes detailed examinations of individual poets and concludes by considering the continued influence of the childlike aesthetic in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poetry.