In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau , Barbara K©œhler returns to Homer ́s Odyssey , not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West ́ 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. K©œhler ́s return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from ́er ́ to ́sie ́, from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices ́ Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself ́ with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corporeality and multivocality which underlies the ́virtual reality ́ of the printed text. The eight essays in this volume explore K©œhler ́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 ́dialectic of enlightenment ́; its incorporation of the voices of poetic predecessors; and the surprising alliance it uncovers between poetry and quantum theory.