Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize
A multilayered book and performance, A Short History of Anger speaks through fragments, fractures, song, and the voices of a Greek Chorus.
Recently, she has staged A Short His. -Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge About the Author JOY Manesiotis is the author of They Sing to Her Bones, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize.
I would count it a privilege to hold your hand and keen these poems together.
Sit here with me.
When no remedy is coming, poets at least make it possible to sit in the dirt and weep.
And the terrible thing is, when I look up from this book, our landscape is the same as inside it: on fire. -Eleanor Wilner, author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017 When, in Anna Akhmatova\'s famous poem, she was asked \'Can you describe this?\' about an atrocity she lived through, she replied, \'Yes, I can.\' In A Short History of Anger, Joy Manesiotis lifts the same burden of responsibility to her own shoulders, and the beautiful, heartbreaking poem she made here could have been written a thousand years ago, or yesterday. -Ilya Kaminsky, authorof Dancing In Odessa and Deaf Republic When a great catastrophe, the genocide of the Greeks of Smyrna, is immured in silence, does collective horror harbor in the genes-the blood line a long fuse smoldering with hidden fire, \'Smyrna burning and burning....\' How to speak of such things? But \'who will sing the moirolaia to help the souls cross over?\' In answer, voices--ancestral, choral, personal-rise from the ashes in this eloquent moirolaia of Joy Manesiotis: recovered history, lamentation, remembrance, release.
Manesiotis is wonder poet, one whose work I admire deeply.
So, watch how the line-breaks, sentences, precise orchestrations and wonders of syntax work in her poems, how they move us to a different register of human emotions, how they open doors we did not know exist.
What People Are Saying Joy Manesiotis is a brilliant poet, one who understands, that lyric, as Joseph Brodsky once insisted, is a soul\'s release into language.
Governed by its musical, ritualistic construction, it excavates a legacy of genocide and displacement that resonates through successive generations.
This lament confronts the massacre of Greek citizens in the 1922 Destruction of Smyrna, and the buried traces of this tragedy as they haunt the poet\'s family history.
Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize
A multilayered book and performance, A Short History of Anger speaks through fragments, fractures, song, and the voices of a Greek Chorus
