This poem is from Phoebe Giannisi’s book "Chimera" (New Directions, 2024) an ambitious polyphonic exploration of the seam that connects human and animal, myth and motherhood. It is the culmination a field research project in the goat-herding community of Vlachs, a people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans who speak their own indigenous language and practice transhumance. What I love about this poem, and Phoebe’s poetry more broadly, is the invitation to step into an “I” that is multiple and many-placed, chimeric.
Brian Sneeden on "Transhumance II" |
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"Where the Mind Really Wants to Go: On Sara Nicholson’s April"
“April is made of thoughts like this, inconvenient thoughts, outcasts from the game world’s—the world’s—needy, bad logic. Self-liberation involves constructing a personal logic, a different way of being, one arrived at through incessant, sometimes inconvenient lines of questioning. The lyric method is figured in the poems as a kind of recalcitrance, where worldly obligations are experienced as interruptions, even incursions.”
viaCLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Vincent Toro on Language as Form
"Form is not merely shape, it’s concept. It’s not merely a concept, it is a vessel for culture that transmits the values and ways of a people....When our own forms are marginalized or entirely ignored while an oppressor culture forcefully imposes their own forms on us, some of us are going to act reflexively to such an action, and some of us are going to make it a mission to reclaim our own forms and create space for them to be appreciated and respected in equal proportion. This is, in part, the reason for my devotion to the décima." |
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