The first English translation of one of Greece's foremost poetic voices, now in a revised second edition, offers a contemporary Odyssey of loss, nostalgia, motherhood, and metamorphosis.
The mythical characters and scenes in Homerica never feel otherworldly—instead, they appear alongside the tow truck, 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 loom weaving together strands of the mythological past. Homerica was the first book to introduce Giannisi's voice to English-language readers, and this second edition includes a new preface by Eleni Sikelianos and a translator's note.
"Giannisi's poetry is a wonderful combination of the classical and the underground avant-garde. Trained in both architecture and ancient Greek, her poems engage the problem of how to inhabit the spaces in which we live, from the vacant lot and the swimming pool to the page of the book. What a joy to have the entire Homerica sequence 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
"[An] unusually brilliant translation." —Anne Carson, The Paris Review
"Giannisi's work shines with such fragments: minimal, direct, and dense with loss." —Max Sydney Smith
"A lean, lucid collection of poems that articulates homecomings flawlessly." —Kirkus Reviews
"Giannisi interweaves the past with the present to experience the world around her from a new vantage point." —Jessica Gigot, New York Times
Press:
https://www.arteidolia.com/sensuous-silences-on-phoebe-giannisis-homerica/
http://review31.co.uk/article/view/536/a-radical-reimagining
https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/poetry/four-poems-greece-phoebe-giannisi
https://worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/march/homerica-phoebe-giannisi
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/phoebe-giannisi/homerica/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/12/20/contributors-favorite-books-2017/
