blUe magnets: a few millibreaths away from intimacy. Yiannis Andronikidis. A) Glimpse) Of), 2024. 104 pages.

It is often the work of poets to do the impossible, to extend language beyond its limits into a space of possibility. Yiannis Andronikidis wades deep into this work in blUe magnets: a few millibreaths away from intimacy, a bilingual hybrid collection. The book orients itself around Andronikidis's family archive, a physical box of archival materials that document his grandparents' story of migration and return. blUe magnets is divided into halves presented as equivalent—one in English, one in Greek—composed through a process Andronikidis calls 'autotranslation.' The book is deceptively slim, each mirrored half taking only 52 pages. In those pages, Andronikidis plumbs the archive's depths and emerges with language that buzzes with a haunted electricity. The family archive grows ears, becomes a body, the body becomes time, and the body in time becomes labor, goes on strike.

On its surface, the concept of 'autotranslation' seems to describe Andronikidis's choice to write blUe magnets in both Greek and English—like his grandparents, Yiannis Andronikidis has his own story of migration across borders and languages. The book's bilingualism is a literal self-translation, something many people who speak more than one language do regularly without thinking much about it. But this literal translation seems to be just one layer of Andronikidis's autotranslational practice. blUe magnets is itself a translation of a selfhood that begins in the past, with the family archive. How does a life story translate itself into a box of fragments? How can a box of fragments be translated again to reveal that story? And how does a family history translate itself into those who are born into it? The book searches for these answers.

blUe magnets opens with images: first a photograph of a caliper, then a box. Next is "archive," an essay that begins with the author's discovery of the box, which is full of archival family materials, including documents, photographs, and ephemera. The essay reveals a family story of migration led by Andronikidis's grandfather, N.K., beginning in 1960 from Thessaloniki (northern Greece) to Widnau (northeastern Switzerland) and then to Sudbury (Ontario, Canada) with his new wife, S.K. While in Canada, N.K. finds work in a precision mechanics and optics factory, where he measures optical instruments with a caliper and micrometer. Finally, the family moves back to Greece in 1978. This elliptical migration and its archival record are the foundational material of blUe magnets, but this opening essay also spins numerous outside references into its narrative field, citing sources as wide ranging as conversations with relatives; definitions of adopted or invented terms; works of art; and the writings of various poets and theorists, including Lisa Robertson, Nathanaël, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among many others. Sometimes these accumulating footnotes take up as much as half the page. N.K.'s story—and the author's by extension—becomes noisy with outside signals.

Noise saturates blUe magnets beyond the book's opening essay: like an old radio, Andronikidis's poetry sparkles with interference. Bits of dialogue and quoted references are frequently dropped into the middle of a poem, their relevance proven by their proximity and presence. I looked for my footing in the world of blUe magnets in its repetitions, of which there are many. I noted the measurement tools, the physics. I wondered how one might translate a millimeter into a millibreath. I noted all the guts. The first poem in the suite "DEAR," is called "stomach," and it reflects upon a multimodal process of engaging with the archive:

your stories sliced & remixed    organs, days & rooms ; change tends to play
the role of omnivorous semiotics    wild-quoting minting pixels & weaving
phantom sounds in blue wefts        ; a role irreal enough    to shovel in
your heart trees ; i'm making viscous jellies out of poem-letter ellipticals
&      watery images      elastic with      knowledge & tendencies
my compulsive repetition to chew them magnetic tape & scratch them blue

(16)

This poem clearly gestures toward the epistolary form through the titling of the suite ("DEAR,"), but it's never totally clear whether it's the stomach that's being addressed; I read much of it as a letter to N.K. But by addressing the stomach directly in the title, Andronikidis writes into and through it. The stomach, like the other bodily organs and appendages that appear throughout blUe magnets, is less object of address or subject than it is an autonomic ("compulsive") listening device, and a method of intimate engagement with the archive and the relationships it holds. Through the stomach, the archive is studied, digested, and transformed.

The body continues to be a vehicle toward intimacy with the archive in "monu:mouth," another poem in the "DEAR," suite: 

if i wanted to reach you        i'd press my
self against a mirror           tongue's out
mouth's compressed           jaw's dropping

(20)

Here, the stomach makes way for the mouth, which becomes a site of translational exertion. Rejecting a mirror-image ideal of translation, Andronikidis writes through the stomach and the mouth to gesture toward something more alchemical. The poem continues:

                     instead              i  twist your shapes
stomach mouth alphabet    to carry on
to speak your mouth
to eat from
our temperature           to make a monu:mouth

(20)

The concept of the "monument" that Andronikidis invokes here bears little resemblance to the sorts of hard, cold objects we might ordinarily associate with monuments. The word comes from the Latin "monere": to remind. Andronikidis's "monu:mouth" brings the act of remembering and reminding back into the body. The monument becomes a verb that takes place in a living organ, translating the past into a felt utterance. 

As I traced Andronikidis's poetics in blUe magnets, I returned repeatedly to one of the many reference points in "archive": a dictionary definition of blue magnetism, which is based on the historical two-fluid theory of magnetism that postulates that two magnetic fluids, red and blue, are charged toward the North and South poles, respectively. Blue magnetism clearly holds some weight in this book by lending it its title, and its essential drive to move south could describe the experience of N.K., who migrated twice to the north in search of opportunity, and then finally returned south, to the familiar home he longed for. Blue is also a color of reflective surfaces and optical trickery, like the bluish appearance of human vasculature when observed through the skin. There is also the blue of the sea, produced by its reflection from the sky back onto its own surface. Maybe this, too, is an autotranslation. Somewhere between and among these enigmatic blues and informed by his grandfather's work in optical measurement, Andronikidis documents an intimate poetic practice in which the body becomes a vehicle for translation across language, time, and space.

The pull of blue magnetism offers a shape to Andronikidis's family history, marked by departure and return, and this shape can be read as the fingerprint of the book's overall geometry. In the first sentence of "archive," which is also the first sentence of the book—or the last, depending on which language you start with—Andronikidis writes: "There's an intimate story I'd like to share; then again, what's furthest within?" (8) The sentence is a loop, reaching outward and then back into itself, with the phrase "furthest within" signifying distance and nearness at the same time. We see this loop again in the book's bilingualism. The last sentence (if you start with English) reflects the first, though it carries linguistic resonances that the English doesn't, and it’s hard to say which one is the "original": Υπάρχει μια οικεία ιστορία που θα ήθελα να μοιραστώ· από την άλλη, τι να είναι τόσο κρυμμένο στο βάθος του σπιτιού;" (8) The repeated looping in blUe magnets traces N.K.'s migration to Switzerland and Canada, and his return home. It also traces the intimacy in the art of translation—of entering into another's language in order to feel out the contours of one's own mouth. As the book spirals into the archive, it begins to retreat into itself, rewinding its own tape in another tongue and returning to its first letter, which has now taken a different shape.

On Chimera by Phoebe Giannisi, translated by Brian Sneeden. New Directions, 2024.

When writing about a book as sprawling and multi-faceted as Phoebe Giannisi's Chimera, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Giannisi herself offers us some useful thoughts on beginnings in "Transhumance I," a poem that appears near the end of the book and is dedicated to her two children. She invokes the Book of Genesis:

i.

In the beginning was the grazing
the pasture, sections of earth gathered extended

suffused from rain and the elements

eaten

by footsteps, the cursive of animals and humans

echoing

the valleys, streams, and summits beyond

brought back voices.

ii.

In the beginning was the field. (73)

Chimera is about grazing and fields, animals and humans. It is also about beginnings, language, the self and the other, wildness and domestication, the individual and the collective, ecology, the history of science, motherhood, theater, technology, myth, migration, the ancient past and the mysterious present. The book is a self-contained universe that explodes across a slim hundred pages, infinitely expanding and complete with its own systems of temporal and relational logic. It is densely layered, making it nearly impossible to perform the kind of neat textual analysis that traditional modes of literary inquiry would ask us to do. Nevertheless, since Chimera begins and ends with etymology, I will begin there as well.

Chimera begins by naming itself, offering us a series of definitions of the word "chimera" as it is used in modern Greek: the mythic she-goat, the hybrid animal, the volcano in Lycia, the self-deluding fantasy, and the botanical graft. Microchimerism—the condition of carrying traces of someone else's DNA, first observed in humans after giving birth—is also defined in the book's early pages, binding the concept of the chimera to the experience of motherhood. At the end of the book, more of the associative wordplay that directs Chimera's movements is revealed in a list of linked definitions: "tragoudia" (tragedy) - "tragoudi" (song) - "tragos" (goat). "Nomad" traces its origins and leaps across a homonym to find itself in a strange relationship to "nomos" (law). Some instances of wordplay in this list appear based on a relatively traditional mode of etymological tracing; while others, including the character "Goatself," play on purely sonic relationships [in Greek, "ego" (I) is homophone to "aigo" (goat)]. Even the Aegean Sea—whose waves ancient Greeks compared to jumping goats—gets its name from the animal.

Giannisi activates her language from its very root, every tendril lit up to reveal all that exists within and around it. Suddenly it's all connected: goat, sea, song, tragedy, Giannisi's story of the goatself ("aigedy"), the chimera. At the same time, these relationships that begin in language come to life within the book itself: animal converges with landscape, human merges with the animals that we use and consume, technologies are absorbed into the bodies and societies that use them, and voices that couldn't possibly inhabit the same place and time suddenly coexist with ease. The chimera, through its many meanings and the associative leaps they invite, generates its own linguistic and mythic orbit. These multiplicities and movements—across land, time, body, and voice—become Chimera's central organizing logic, crossing into and out of each other to produce a hybrid text so finely woven that it's impossible to distinguish its many threads.

Chimera takes as its core material Giannisi's three years of field research with the Vlachs, a nomadic people indigenous to northern Greece and the southern Balkans. Giannisi's interest in their goat herding practices, in particular, thrusts the animal into the poetic and linguistic center of the book. Several Vlach shepherds speak in Chimera, their voices appearing alongside a wide array of others, including a range of philosophers from ancient to modern, mythical characters, various European explorers, a narrator (presumably Giannisi) and their dog, and Giannisi's own mother and children, among many others. And, of course, Goatself, who feels like the poetic heartbeat behind the narrator's more familiar embodied voice. Even when speaking as a "self", Giannisi speaks simultaneously from more than one place.

What happens to a book like this one, so defined by polyphony and border-crossing, when it crosses into a new language? Brian Sneeden's English translation invites new linguistic slippages into Chimera's already slippery lexicon. As I was reading, I couldn't stop thinking about "swallowing" and "swallows", which fly like "flowers/ in the air" through the poem "Hymn to Swallow and Nightingale" (58), and whose return in later pages is a harbinger of spring. As they transition off their mother's milk, goats, like people, begin to chew and swallow and think for themselves: "after weaning/ she ruminates her food/ recalls it back into her mouth/ from the stomach to consider it again" (39). I think again of the many meanings of "swallow" in "Transhumance I," when a Greek idiom is translated in such a way that it reminds me of Kronos—a mythological figure who hears a prophecy that his son will overthrow him, and later tries to eat his infant son, Zeus, but is tricked into eating a stone instead:

–What does God cast down that the earth does not swallow?

...

–You cannot eat a stone, mother says

instead of

you cannot escape your fate (76)

Language does what it always does here, between the "swallow" (the bird) and the "swallow" (of the stone or of roughage): it moves, through clever word choice or happenstance, toward new pastures. Chimera's celebration of this sort of playful linguistic movement lends itself to this kind of reading—a reading in which we find connections everywhere, even where, perhaps, they are not supposed to be. Moving the text from Greek into English not only carries Giannisi's world into a new language; it also pollinates the edges of its own poetic ecosystem, adding Sneeden's English to the book's cast of voices. In the list of voices that appears at the end of Chimera, we find that “you” is included as one of the participants; and while a “you” does speak briefly in the book, the character itself remains ambiguous—it could be anyone—you, me, or someone else altogether. We each write in our own connections, get hung up in our own slippages.

Chimera is an open door that invites the reader into Giannisi's unique polyphonic universe. At the same time, it is also an open wound; a wound inflicted by the pain a mother experiences when separating from their child, whose DNA they will continue to carry forever. Beginning with a single word—"chimera"— Giannisi writes into this wound. The result is a book that is also an ecosystem, full of impossible crossings and alive with unexpected communions.