Phoebe Giannisi - Homerica (2025)

Forthcoming

May 21

Written By Andrew Bourne

Phoebe Giannisi
Homerica

Translated from Greek by
BRIAN SNEEDEN

Introduction by
ELENI SIKELIANOS

Bilingual Edition
November 20, 2025

BIOS

PHOEBE GIANNISI is a poet, performer, and artist. Born in Athens, she is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Homerica and, most recently, Thetis and Aedon. Her work focuses on the borders between poetry and performance, theory and representation, and investigates the connections of poetry with the body and place. A Humanities Fellow of Columbia University, Giannisi was the inaugural Vakalo Family Visiting Artist at the University of Michigan, and a Mazza Writer in Residence at the Poetry Center of San Francisco State University. Giannisi is a founding member of the poetry magazine FRMK and a Professor of Architecture and Cultural Studies at the University of Thessaly. Giannisi’s unique approach, called “chimeric poetics,” focuses on the polyphony of voices attached to place, and the ethnography of animated subjects that inhabit it.

BRIAN SNEEDEN is a poet and Modern Greek translator from the American South living in Scotland. His most recent translation of Phoebe Giannisi’s poetry is GOATSONG (Fitzcarraldo Editions). His translations have received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, and PEN/Heim Translation Grant. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Review, and other magazines, and has received the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Barthelme Prize, and the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize. Translations of his poetry have been published internationally in Arabic, Italian, Modern Greek, and Serbian. In 2017, he co-founded World Poetry Books with Peter Constantine, and he is currently a senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Phoebe Giannisi
Homerica

Translated from Greek by
BRIAN SNEEDEN

Introduction by
ELENI SIKELIANOS

The first English translation of one of Greece’s foremost poetic voices, now in a revised second edition, offers a contemporary Odyssey of loss, longing, motherhood, and metamorphosis.

The mythic characters and scenes of Homerica never feel otherworldly—rather, they appear alongside the tugboat, the bicycle, the television, and the helicopter. Brian Sneeden’s masterful translation captures the Delphic rhythms of Giannisi’s oracular poems, which rarely travel in a straight line but rather glide across multiple threads of time, like a loom interweaving strands of the mythological past. Homerica was the first book to introduce Giannisi’s voice to English-language readers and this second edition includes a new preface by Eleni Sikelianos and a translator’s note.

“[An] unusually excellent translation.” —Anne Carson, The Paris Review

“Giannisi’s work glitters with such fragments: minimal, direct, and dense with loss.” —Max Sydney Smith, Review 31

“A nuanced, clear set of poems that seamlessly articulate homeward journeys.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Giannisi’s poetry is a wonderful combination of the classical and the underground avant-garde. Trained both in architecture and Ancient Greek, her poems tackle the problem of how to inhabit the spaces we live in — from the abandoned lot and the swimming pool to the page of the book. What a pleasure to have the full Homerica series in Brian Sneeden’s lyrical translation.” —Karen Van Dyck

“Sneeden is a meticulous translator and a poet in his own right. He brings Phoebe Giannisi's work to life with immediacy and conviction.” —Edmund Keeley

“Giannisi intertwines the past with the present in order to experience the world around her anew.” —Jessica Gigot, New York Times

BIOS