The Temz Review
Dimitris Lyacos' With the People from the Bridge

May 2021 | reviews

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.

The temz review
Dimitris Lyacos' Z213: Exit (vol. 1 of Poena Damni trilogy)

Apr 2021 | reviews

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 ...