Giannisi turns the quotidian into the magical in poems that push against the shifting present moment.

Publishers Weekly

Exploring motherhood, myth, and “transhumance,” Chimera is a stunningly ambitious poetry volume by the award-winning Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi

Available Jul, 09 2024

Chimera

Poetry by Phoebe Giannisi

Translated from Greek by Brian Sneeden

In her third collection in English, Phoebe Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics that blends field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts. The center of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of a community of Vlachs, a people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans who speak their own language and practice transhumance. In these poems, day-to-day activities such as shearing and shepherding mix with snippets of conversations, oral tradition, and song—locating a larger story in this ancient marriage between humans and animals. Through her poetry and fieldwork, this mytho-historical connection between metamorphosis and utterance takes form in what the Greek newspaper Kathimerini calls “a bold achievement: a studio wherein poems and other texts, other voices, become exhibited."

Paperback(published Jul, 09 2024)

ISBN
9780811237826
Price US
96
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
96

Ebook

ISBN
9780811237833
Portrait of Phoebe Giannisi

Phoebe Giannisi

Contemporary Greek poet

Giannisi turns the quotidian into the magical in poems that push against the shifting present moment.

Publishers Weekly

Giannisi is unquestionably herself within a vanguard of Greek poets for whom self-awareness and honesty have become second nature.

Shon Arieh-Lerer, World Literature Today

An intimate and utterly feminine perspective on language and regeneration.

Jessica Gigot, The New York Times