Homerica

Poetry. Women's Studies. Greek Studies. Translated from the Greek by Brian Sneeden. For the first time in English--a volume of poems by one of Greece's foremost poetic voices. Phoebe Giannisi's HOMERICA offers a contemporary Odyssey of loss, longing, motherhood, and metamorphosis, re- weaving classical mythology with modern experience. Yet the mythic characters and scenes never feel otherworldly--rather, they appear alongside the tugboat, the bicycle, the television, and the helicopter. Brian Sneeden's masterful translation captures the Delphic rhythms of Giannisi's oracular poems, which rarely travel in a straight line but rather glide across multiple threads of time, like a look interweaving strands of the mythological past.

Giannisi's poetry is a wonderful combination of the classical and the underground avant-garde. Trained both in architecture and Ancient Greek, her poems tackle the problem of how to inhabit the spaces we live in--from the abandoned lot and the swimming pool to the page of the book. What a pleasure to have the full Homerica series in Brian Sneeden's lyrical translation.--Karen Van Dyck

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: Phoebe Giannisi
Publisher: World Poetry Books
Published: 12/05/2017
Pages: 148
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.50w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780999261309


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2018

About the Author
Giannisi, Phoebe: - Phoebe Giannisi is one of Greece's foremost contemporary poets, and is the author of six books of poetry, including HOMERICA (Kedros, 2009) and, most recently, Rhapsodia (Gutenberg, 2016). Giannisi is a co-editor of FRMK, a biannual journal of poetry, poetics, and visual arts, and she has translated Ancient Greek lyric poetry as well as poetry by Gerhard Falkner, Barbara Koehler, Gregor Laschen, Jesper Svenbro, and Andr' Pieyre de Mandiargues. A 2016 Humanities Fellow of Columbia University, Giannisi is an associate professor at the University of Thessaly. Her work focuses on the borders between poetry and performance, theory and representation, and investigates the connections of poetics with body and place. She lives in Volos, Greece.Sneeden, Brian: - Brian Sneeden is the author of the poetry collection, Last City (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2018). His poems and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Beloit Poetry Journal, Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications, and translations of his poems have appeared in international magazines in Greek, Albanian, and Serbian. He is the senior editor of New Poetry in Translation.