Beautifully translated…The book resounds with an “alien voice from the fence of the teeth.” Alien, not only because it is the song of the cicadas that is constantly evoked and lurks from underneath the pages…, but even more so because the voice here belongs to all sorts of beings, especially the non-human ones."

Cristina Pérez Díaz, Asymptote Journal

The celebrated Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi explores connections between language, life, and the natural world

Included in the New Poetry! bundle Get the bundle
Included in the Available Titles catalog

Cicada

Poetry by Phoebe Giannisi

Translated from Greek by Brian Sneeden

By one of Greece’s foremost contemporary poets, Cicada is Phoebe Giannisi’s second collection in English. The cicada signifies metamorphosis in this breathtaking, lyrical book, which evokes the spirits of Archilochus, Plato, Empedocles, and Heraclitus. As the translator Brian Sneeden remarks: “The ‘I’ in Giannisi’s poetry is never static, never a fixed point, but part of a process of rebodying the ambient.” Yet, despite the fluid, mythic nature of Giannisi’s poems, they are also exquisitely rooted in the everyday: the sea heard through a window, the murmur of a distant mechanical crane, a damp wind, a photo of John and Yoko. Giannisi is a poet internationally known for her idiosyncratic eco-poetics, as well as her poetic multimedia works and performances, and most of all for her brilliant vision glowing at the borders of language, voice, place, and memory.

“Cicada” originated from “Tettix” (the ancient Greek word for this insect), a commissioned exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens in 2012, curated by Stamatis Schizakis. Tettix is a project presented through various media such as performances, video and sound works, as well as poetic manuscripts that now belong to the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens.

Paperback(published Mar, 01 2022)

ISBN
9780811230230
Price US
16.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
128

Ebook(published Mar, 01 2022)

ISBN
9780811230247
Portrait of Phoebe Giannisi

Phoebe Giannisi

Contemporary Greek poet

Beautifully translated…The book resounds with an “alien voice from the fence of the teeth.” Alien, not only because it is the song of the cicadas that is constantly evoked and lurks from underneath the pages…, but even more so because the voice here belongs to all sorts of beings, especially the non-human ones."

Cristina Pérez Díaz, Asymptote Journal

These poems are dynamic in their visual and linguistic movement, “the agitation the ecstasy in life the ego that ricochets within the body the body within the world naked filled with emotions.” Giannisi turns the quotidian into the magical in poems that push against the shifting present moment.

Publishers Weekly (starred)

Phoebe Giannisi’s Cicada masterfully holds conversations on the accuracy of language in the face of mortality and truth.

Livia Meneghin, Gasher

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

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

An intimate and utterly feminine perspective on language and regeneration.

Jessica Gigot, The New York Times