Friday 14 November 2025 5:00pm
Room SG1, The Alison Richard Building
About
Friday 14 November 2025, 17:00–19:00
Alison Richard Building, Room SG1
Launch of Phoebe Giannisi’s poetry book, Goatsong by Fitzcarraldo Editons.
Join us for an early evening of poetry readings and conversation with the author and the translator.
About Goatsong
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.
Phoebe Giannisi
Phoebe Giannisi is the author of eight collections of poetry.
A 2016 Humanities Fellow of Columbia University, Giannisi is a professor of architecture at the University of Thessaly, and co-editor of the literary journal frmk.
She has translated Ancient Greek lyric poetry as well as the poetry of Barbara Koehler, Gregor Laschen, Jesper Svenbro and André Pieyre de Mandiargues.
She lives in Volos, Greece.
Brian Sneeden
Brian Sneeden is the author of Last City (Carnegie Mellon, 2018).
His poetry and translations have received the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and other recognitions.
He is a lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University.