In 2019 I interviewed Dimitris Lyacos on the occasion of the US tour/launch of his trilogy, Poena Damni, which had been recently released in the English complete edition. When we met, he had just read for the inmates of a few Arizona prisons. He had also visited for the first time Los Angeles’s “Skid Row,” which reviewers of his work had compared, on occasion, to the setting of his second book, With the People from the Bridge. [...]

A video review by Chris Via.Carpe librum! - Leaf by Leaf

32.30 MIN - 42.19 MINOfficial opening of the polip festival - READINGS Youtube Video

Which books help us understand the world in 2021?  Panelists: Slavenka Drakulić (CRO), Dimitris Lyacos (GR), Nikola Madžirov (MKD)  Moderator: Alida Bremer

With the People from the Bridge is the second book in Greek poet Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy (translated by Shorsha Sullivan and published by Shoestring Press). You can read my review of the first book in the trilogy, Z213: Exit, here. With the People from the Bridge is not a sequel in the traditional sense—there is no narrative continuity, no shared characters, no links, no tenuous connections between the events. It is, instead, a restaging/extension of the themes and aesthetic of the first book.

Translated by Shorsha Sullivan and published by Shoestring Press as part of a beautifully-designed box set, Z213: Exit, the first volume in Dimitris Lyacos’ three-volume long poem Poena Damni, is a vertiginous work that is at once archetypal, transcendent, and uniquely suited to this particular moment in time. Poised between novella, poem and journal, Z213: Exit tracks a man’s escape from a guarded building and his flight through a nightmarish, seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape. The man carries with him a Bible between whose passages he records his journey, and the text of the poem is a palimpsest of fragments ...