About the Book
A Greek American poet's spirited search for the origins of her name becomes a gateway to self-discovery.
Everyone has a name that comes from somewhere. Greek American poet Catherine Strisik's brilliant fourth collection, Goat, Goddess, Moon, is a deeply personal search to uncover the roots of her given name. In poems that originate in Crete and Thessaloniki, Greece, and in northern New Mexico's San Cristobal and Taos, Strisik, like an archeologist, revisits and reimagines the ancestral Greek villages that are her imprint of origin and reveal the love that endures. Herein are poems that include the Greek language, the speaker's early tongue and that of her ancestors: Maybe agape is what we mean/ agape on the edge of Fortetsa to bend/Yes bend closer/mythed/unmythed. These bold, body-centered poems explore villages, labyrinths, and the given name Aikaterίna found in myth, love, desire, superstition, beauty, the physicality of woman/goddess, elemental bodies of landscape/waters, and a mystical camaraderie with abandoned wild dogs, cats, and sacrificial goats. This is a journey of self-discovery, one that fully embraces family origins and a celebratory arrival:
Wake up Wake up and still spring, and the goats
they bleat Hariklea, Andreas, Sultana, Ourania, Nausicaa and from my basil bowl too
the bones resembling
say it
Katerίna
Yes. and yes.
About the Author :
Catherine Strisik, poet, teacher, editor is author of The Mistress (3: A Taos Press, 2016, awarded New Mexico/AZ Book Award for Poetry 2017); Thousand-Cricket Song (Plain View Press, 2010, second edition 2016); and chapbook: Insectum Gravitis (Main Street Rag, 2019, finalist New Mexico/AZ Book Award 2020). She is co-founder and editor of Taos Journal of Poetry, was Taos, New Mexico's Poet Laureate 2020- 2021, as well as the recipient of a Taoseña Award as Woman of Impact for literary contribution in northern N.M. Strisik is a Pushcart nominee with over 30 years of publications with poetry translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. She offers editorial consultations for essayists and poets and facilitates both private and small group poetry workshops. Currently she divides her time between Cape Ann, MA and Taos, New Mexico where she has lived for over 40 years
Review :
"Goat, Goddess, Moon lovingly traces a lineage through history, myth and new experience. 'I speak broken Greek. We say fluent Greek, ' Strisik writes. 'Say it. Say. While standing/ on your head: the Greek alphabet.' These poems--part tender probe of heritage and part ancestral elegy--revel in sumptuous food, the body and the sea. With its nourishing glimpses of identity this collection will encourage any reader to more closely embrace their own cultural inheritance."-- Lauren Camp, New Mexico State Poet Laureate (2022-2025), author of In Old Sky
"'In a Greek kitchen everything turns translucent' sings Catherine Strisik in a characteristic line of pure lucidity that's both plainspoken and exalted. But in her poem about the familial soup that's called Magirίtsa, the kitchen stove grows darker with tribal, smoky origins: 'I taste their entrails / and organs their /sacrifice at midnight // our tongue.' This kind of verbal richness is there to savor in every exquisite verse of this book, a book truth-tested on the tongue like an ancient family recipe. The seriousness and sensuality, expressed with gorgeous lyric expertise are reminiscent of the great Greek poet Odysseus Elytis. In the weaving back and forth between cultures, between the pain of loss and aging and the joys of love and travel, Strisik is as much a travel guide of the heart as she is an initiate of the mysteries. On the island of Crete, a simple passing greeting of 'good evening' becomes a little ode of gratitude: 'When I stop what I'm doing, what appears like nothing really, a walk, / and listen, their kalispera / my kalispera in unison kalispera.' This singular voice, alive to its time and place, teems with a quiet, ancestral chorus."--George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos
"At the center of Strisik's lush collection is her desire to be called her Greek name: Katerína-- Her poems lead us on a journey, through the sensuous 'holy body, ' and communion of family: 'my grandmother always knelt in the chamomile' and the land itself, 'the sacred spray from the Cretan Sea', the sparkle of light on waves, small boys and goats, the bloom of a white orchid, thousand year history wrapped in her grandfather's voice. Her poems are tactile, filled with desire, earthy and visionary, echos of the past, the music of the Greek. All the while, beneath and between is her naming: Aikaterína is a large scope of a poem at the root of the book, in the mouth and body and memory, as she writes: 'Katerina is my Greek name/murmured and body plentiful/aroused red below bath water's....my woman's hope.'"--Veronica Golos, author of GIRL
"In the third poem of her new book, Catherine Strisik imagines what her Greek ancestor carried in his pocket--'...soil from Trapezítsa, or wheat wrapped in fabric from his mother's hem.' It is sustenance for the journey of an immigrant offspring born in a new world, signposting her way back to the source of her strength, her lineal makeup and her presence. Food and language are the travel codes, and Strisik learns the ingredients and the right pronunciations, down to the saying and meaning of her own name. Goat Goddess Moon--they keep company in her poems, making them scalers of great heights, mythical, and full of light."--Mervyn Taylor, author of Getting Through: New & Selected Poems
"In Goat, Goddess, Moon, Catherine Strisik returns us to the villages and rituals of a Greece where time is marked by what's passed down, in anecdotes, recipes, and the ways particular Greek words like psomi (bread) and aromatiko (perfumed) will rekindle lineages. It is in the kitchens, landscapes, and myths that a particularly feminine sensibility is claimed in words, and names, that travel between languages and terrains as 'Greek women form//the most beautiful/mouths when speaking.'"--Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of The re in Refuge
"Goat, Goddess, Moon is a sensual, spiritual, and physical singing through the body and through place, of identifying with, and returning to an imprint of origin; that of ancestral northern Greek villages, diaspora, and the sublime mythical labyrinth that is Crete. Catherine Strisik's poems in Goat, Goddess, Moon are an intimate act embodying eros, the tender unified vein of family, myth, dialect, superstition, mystical camaraderie with abandoned wild dogs and cats, sacrificial goats, and elemental bodies of landscape/waters and in so doing, harmonically affirms the self, named Katerina."--Leslie Ullman, author of Unruly Tree: Poems
