The Scattered Papers of Penelope

“‘My villa is built from the body’s white energy and everything confirms the indestructible nature of my erotic scheming.’ So writes Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke in this essential anthology of a life’s work, in which the mind accompanies the body in its restless experiments. The knowledge and blindness the human body brings to the self are here explored in all their registers, illuminating the darkest corners we contain. Anghelaki-Rooke’s work, here rendered into English by some of the finest translators of Modern Greek, ruffles the silences surrounding us.”

Drawn from the traditions of Greek myth, history, and literature, The Scattered Papers of Penelope is poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s first full retrospective collection available in English. Carried over from the Greek by an array of noted translators, including the editor Karen Van Dyck, Anghelaki-Rooke’s poetry is bold, sensual, and brash. She reexamines Greek myth and history through the female body—the body of Penelope, the poet’s own body, scarred by illness, and the bodies of stray animals. Other poems and sequences take the form of a journal kept during the first Gulf War, prose poems about modern violence and the destruction of nature, existential musings on beings and things on their own, and lush descriptions of the domestic world on the poet’s adopted home island of Aegina. The Scattered Papers of Penelope introduces to American readers a major global poetic voice, a winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize.  

“Karen Van Dyck is the ideal translator for this capacious, island-grounded poet of mythic invention and appetite, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke.  After years of lucid, concerted work with the poet, as well as her previous translators, Van Dyck delivers us a luminous volume of poems which is tonally pitch-perfect, syllabically Apollonian, revealing Anghelaki-Rooke’s unified, willful and intent oeuvre. This collection exists in poetry, not in translation.”