Chimera
Phoebe Giannisi
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
From the publisher
Translated by Brian Sneeden
Exploring motherhood, myth, and “transhumance,” Chimera is a stunningly ambitious poetry volume by the award-winning Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi
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.”