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In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau, Barbara KÃ¶hler returns to Homerâ€™s Odyssey, not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West â€“ and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. KÃ¶hlerâ€™s return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from â€˜erâ€™ to â€˜sieâ€™, from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices â€“ Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself â€“ with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corporeality and multivocality which underlies the â€˜virtual realityâ€™ of the printed text.The eight essays in this volume explore KÃ¶hlerâ€™s iridescent poem cycle from a variety of different angles: its context in contemporary German refigurations of the classical; its engagement with Homer and the classical tradition; its contribution to feminist philosophy of the subject and a female â€˜dialectic of enlightenmentâ€™; its incorporation of the voices of poetic predecessors; and the surprising alliance it uncovers between poetry and quantum theory.