Manesiotis, Joy: Revoke

Airlie Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 1, 2023

Publisher Marketing: A powerful new collection from the award winning poet, Joy Manesiotis draws on visual art, film, and the lament in Greek culture.

Layered in overlapping movements, REVOKE draws on the poet's early training in visual art and film, as well as the form of the lament in Greek culture, both ancient and contemporary. Poem by poem, the collection becomes symphonic, rising and falling through cycles of multivocality, sound, repetition, and silence. Levels of loss--of mothers and mothering, of the complexities of female agency--are sounded and measured in fragmented, cinematic shifts between image and event as if to investigate how discursive gestures and the lyric, when fractured, can turn in tension to refute linearity, yet still create vivid moments of human time and experience. REVOKE shows us how the epic can be embodied in lyric form, holding all and telling all, with the precision, beauty, and complexity that grief, and all human experience, deserves.

"REVOKE is the rare lyric marvel by a poet who understands the serious task of writing at the threshold. Marry(ing) spirit to matter, Joy Manesiotis's poems simultaneously reach toward a dying mother and the body's struggle to become a mother, and act as both witness and interior pulse, the body revolving on itself. The internal force of lament turns and turns, capable and generous enough to gather the infinities of endless movements. This is a work of great attention, vigor, and accomplishment."
--Jennifer Sweeney, author of Little Spells and Foxlogic, Fireweed

Poetry. Women's Studies.