Overview

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 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.""

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Reviews

"""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 ""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 ""Giannisi’s work glitters with such fragments: minimal, direct and dense with loss."" -- Max Sydney Smith - Review31 ""An intimate and utterly feminine perspective on language and regeneration."" -- Jessica Gigot - The New York Times"

"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 turns the quotidian into the magical in poems that push against the shifting present moment.-- ""Publishers Weekly"" 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"""

Author Information

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.

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