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 ...

Critique de "Avec les gens du pont" de Dimitris LYACOS, traduit du grec par Michel Volkovitch, éd. Le Miel des Anges, 2020

Dimitris Lyacos’s cross-genre trilogy Poena Damni is among the most well-received pieces of contemporary European literature ... 

A PANEL DISCUSSION WITH DIMITRIS LYACOS. POLIP FESTIVAL, PRISTINA, KOSOVO

Same article was also published in http://alnoor.se/article.asp?id=369050

[...] a cadence that allows its more macabre undertones to shine through in a way that is at times vaguely unsettling and at others graphic in ways that are horrifying. [...] filled me with a sense of dread every time I turned the page.

The title of this anthology is already mysterious: Poena Damni . I'm not a Latin, but I would roughly translate it as "The revenge or the punishment of loss". After reading the book, I also realize that it means the loss of home, of orientation, of security. Poena Damni consists of three parts. “Z213: EXIT” has almost a hundred pages, the other two texts about 45 pages each.