Chimera

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 centre of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of the Vlachs, a nomadic people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans, who speak their own language. 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.”

About the Author :
Phoebe Giannisi was born in Athens in 1964 and is the author of seven books of poetry, including Homerica (chosen by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017 in The Paris Review). She is a professor of architecture and cultural studies at the University of Thessaly. Brian Sneeden is a poet, literary translator, and editor. His translations have received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and other recognitions.

Review :
"A book that is also an ecosystem, full of impossible crossings and alive with unexpected communions."--Fani Avramopoulou "Antiphony" Some of the best of her lyric writing... strange and captivating.-- "Publisher's Weekly" An intimate and utterly feminine perspective on language and regeneration.--Jessica Gigot "The New York Times" 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" Giannisi's work glitters with such fragments: minimal, direct and dense with loss.--Max Sydney Smith "Review31" Sneeden is a meticulous translator and a poet in his own right. He brings Phoebe Giannisi's work to life with immediacy and conviction.-- "Edmund Keeley" "Chimera is a book made of so much else besides words: goatskin, myth, pasture, time, dream, stone, history, to name a few; rumination, transit, touch, captivity, to name some others... In the center of Giannisi's poetic frame, one encounters a serious and glimmering inquiry into the human-animal relationship."--Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo "Los Angeles Review of Books"