In the fall of 2018, Shoestring Press finally released Shorsha Sullivan’s English translation of the complete trilogy. This past spring, Lyacos went on a US signing tour, culminating with a reading in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque on May 30. That is where I had the pleasure of meeting him. As we sat on a staircase waiting for the event to begin, an interesting conversation was sparked. The interview that follows was born of that informal exchange, which continued via email

Z213: Exit—the first installment of Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy—eludes a straightforward interpretation and defies easy genre categorization. One of the most striking features of the text, which offers an admixture of poetry, prose, and fractured discourse, is the varied, evanescent nature of the work’s narrative voice. [...]

Regular readers may remember my posts a while back on the first two parts of Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy, and today’s review sees me finishing off the work with a look at the third section. It’s an intriguing, perplexing cycle of books, with each having it’s own unique style; where Z213: Exit was a series of confusing prose fragments, With the People from the Bridge was a confronting play, and today’s choice takes us in yet another direction. This one can most definitely be filed under poetry, but that’s probably the only confident statement I’m prepared to make about it – this isn’t a book that gives up its secrets lightly…

In truth, I suspect it’s almost better not to know too much about this backstory. By withholding information, Lyacos’ and Sullivan’s text, sparse and menacing, challenges the reader to create their own story, and the book is all the better for it.

This monumental work of experimental poetry comprises three books published in various editions over a period of thirty years and is organized around “a cluster of concepts including the scapegoat, the quest, the return of the dead, redemption, physical suffering, [and] mental illness.” In the tradition of prominent postmodernist authors such as William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, and Samuel Beckett, Lyacos has artfully employed language to vividly accentuate the anguish his protagonists experience throughout the series.

However, while Z213: Exit is definitely hard-going, it’s nevertheless absorbing and enjoyable, even if one read is nowhere near enough to unlock its mysteries. The aim of the book, and who and what it’s about, may be unclear, but there’s enough to enjoy in the puzzles and the writing to make me want to revisit it.

READING AT BEYOND BAROQUE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIAMay 30, 2019 @ 8:00 pm Read article at beyondbaroque

RINCON UNIT and WHETSTONE UNIT See website RINCON UNIT See website WHETSTONE UNIT

READING AT MALVERN BOOKS, AUSTIN, TEXASMay 23, 2019 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm Read article at malvernbooks

READING AT RM220, NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANAMay 17, 2019 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pmDimitris Lyacos: Poena Damni  read article antenna.works

As I read The First Death, I imagine the carpet of corpses lining the Mediterranean. Strata and strata of limbs—now bones—piled up during recent decades, all belonging to shiploads of migrants seeking escape through Europe. I can’t help connecting the poetry under my eyes with this precise scenery. The most powerful, the most disturbing imagery Lyacos paints makes sense in this context where it naturally embeds itself.

How did a book of Greek poetry become one of the most-discussed and most-lauded pieces of contemporary European literature? Garrett Phelps, Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote, explains what makes Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy is so unusual—and so difficult to describe.

In conclusion, Poena Damni is a post-tragic work. Certainly, it does not follow from tragedy, if tragedy is intended as an ensemble of formal characteristics, but unequivocally describes the tortured and tragic fall of the (post)modern subject: A person made of one thousand screams whose core of being has broken apart and is spread out like an archipelago of anonymous islands on a vast empty surface.