Ithaca reviewed in Lumiere Review

Haven't had much time for blogging lately, but wanted to tell you about another great review of Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima by Vana Manasiadis, and published by moi.

Julia Cooper has reviewed it in The Lumiere Reader. You can read the whole thing here: http://lumiere.net.nz/index.php/ithaca-island-bay-leaves/, but here are some highlights:

Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: a mythistorima ... is a beautiful atlas of real and fabled locales—mapped, charted, and photographed by a distinct poetic voice.

With poems like “Hectic Hector” and “King of Mycenae,” she fills the quotidian spaces of family and community with mythic abundance. In this abundance, a cross-cultural poetic voice emerges confidently and provocatively, inaugurating a text very much aware of its humour and the boldness of its manipulations.

Indeed, there is a sense of lightness throughout Manasiadis’s work, invoked no doubt by the gusty winds and cyclones of the poems, but also in the poet’s seamless and manifold transitions between cultures and lexicons.

This collection is a masterful debut, speaking with grace and candour to ancestry, migration, community, and love—well worth getting for that long, perpetual trip ahead of you.