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.