Phoebe Giannisi and Brian Sneeden’s Goatsong Book Tour.
Publisher (Fitzcarraldo Editions).
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/2026/04/phoebe-giannisi-and-brian-sneedens-goatsong-book-tour/
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/goatsong/
Phoebe Giannisi and Brian Sneeden, author and translator of Goatsong will be on tour in 2026. Please see below for links and details for each event.
15 April – Gloucester Road Books, Bristol
16 April – The Hellenic Centre, London
17 April – Burley Fisher Books, London
In the publisher's (Fitzcarraldo Editions) words:
'The ancient Greek word for tragedy (τραγωδία) is a compound of goat (τράγος) and song (ᾠδή). In Phoebe Giannisi’s Goatsong, the seam that connects human and animal, myths and history, is the body.
'In Giannisi’s language, life obeys myth. A man places a screaming cicada in his mouth, reminding us of a scene from Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates claims cicadas to have been humans who became entranced by the invention of singing, and didn’t stop to eat or drink. When the goddess Thetis dips her newborn son, Achilles, into the River Styx to protect all but his famous heel where her hand grips, we’re told ‘the place of the mother’s grip / is the mark of death.’
'Adjacent to the mythical setting is the material, where the rumination of goats, their digestive cycle – chewing, swallowing, then recalling food back into the mouth to be reconsidered – begins after weaning, and is lain alongside how we think: ‘from the moment of separation / from the mother / they ruminate.’ In these lyric enactments, all is transformative and transformed; territories of land, the body and history are blurred, and nothing is still.
‘It abounds with imaginative, unexpected phrasing, and is suitably full of light, reflections on memory, home and loss, all with a syntactical velocity.’
— Declan Ryan, Irish Times
‘I was immersed in Phoebe Giannisi’s Goatsong. I grieved with her as a mother, and rejoiced with her as a lover of all wild and wonderful places. Her work lives in me and inspires me to work harder to capture the truth – as the best poetry always does.’
— Sasha Dugdale, author of The Strongbox
‘Goatsong intoxicates with its animality of language, gorgeous lyric and off-kilter metamorphoses, by turns wry, ecstatic and strange. Reading Phoebe Giannisi is like reading pre-Socratic philosophy on all fours, where flies buzz on and off the page and the polyphony of species and elements is both dazzling subject and all-encompassing medium.’
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul
Phoebe Giannisi and Brian Sneeden
