Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has built something unusual here — a publishing project that reaches across Greek modernism, Canadian wilderness fiction, and the body's most private reckonings, all without losing the thread.

Mara: vequinox brings all of it together on this site — poetry in translation, prose fiction, landscape verse, and work that sits right at the edge of desire and survival. Let's start with the Greek poets and what exile actually costs.

Greek Poetry And Exile

Pip: The question running through these translations is what happens to a person when society decides they no longer belong — whether that exile is political, psychological, or simply the condition of seeing clearly.

Mara: Tasos Livaditis puts it with terrible precision: "Things have changed; these days, they don't kill. They only point at you with the finger; it is enough. Then, they make a circle that always becomes smaller; they slowly get closer you retreat against the wall, until in desperation you, alone, open a hole to hide in it."

Pip: So the modern machinery of exclusion doesn't need violence — the circle itself is the punishment. Shrinking space does the work that a bullet used to do.

Mara: Yannis Ritsos works the same territory across two volumes here. In the Exile Diaries poem from Volume III, a woman lighting a heater in the cold becomes the whole landscape: "the wind took her place in the room." Volume IV's "Unacceptable" shows a man who discovers some final truth and goes silent — and is convicted unanimously for that silence.

Pip: Silence as a verdict. That's a neat trick the powerful have always loved.

Mara: Antony Fostieris frames it inward — "Behind our eyes, silent and crouched, we look at the world out there like through the skylight of a prison." And Titos Patrikios, in "Movie Theater," finds a strange truce: torturer and tortured sitting together in the dark, briefly unknown to each other, briefly friends.

Pip: Two hours of cinema as the only available ceasefire.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's poem watches a worm destroy the September harvest and ends simply: "oh Greece, the next morning I found you changed." Kariotakis and Polydouri give us verses described as blood and heart given away like tears. And the collection "Entropy" reaches for something longer — an eternal Odyssey made of "sails, sphinxes and shipwrecks."

Mara: The review of "Introspection" calls all of this a deliberate strategy: "the inward gaze does not lead to withdrawal or passivity — the inner depths become the place from which the confrontation with the world begins."

Pip: Introspection as a launching pad, not a hiding place. That tension between turning inward and turning outward runs straight into the work on desire.

Desire, Body, And Intimacy

Pip: These pieces ask what the body wants when the world outside it has become unbearable — and whether that wanting is survival or its opposite.

Mara: "HEAR ME OUT" answers that directly. The narrator in the tub watches the water turn pink and thinks: "I was again in the same spot, wrapped in my old warmth. And the foolish people who said, 'It's too late for her, unfortunately…' What 'too late?' For me, everything was just starting."

Pip: A return to the womb framed as a beginning. That is one of the more devastating reversals in any of this material.

Mara: "Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy" places desire in a completely different register — elemental, uncontained, bodies by a river's edge "yearning for erotic apexes." "Orange" is sharper and more compressed: a "brazen thief that leads my mind to an erotic voyage." And "Ugga" strips it to the bone — breast, pen, milk, ink, the acts of suckling and writing placed in the same short breath.

Pip: Eros and language as the same bodily function. Honestly, not the worst theory of poetry.

Mara: "Chthonian Bodies" and "Wellspring of Love" pull toward tenderness and community — people sheltering each other, coffee on the stove, the small negotiations of care. The body here is less a site of crisis and more a place where ordinary life quietly insists on continuing.

Pip: From the tub to the kitchen table — and somehow both feel like resistance. The fictional lives in this work carry the same weight.

Fictional Lives And Moral Reckonings

Pip: The prose fiction here keeps returning to a single question: what do you do with a father, a priest, a painter, a spy — someone whose life demands a reckoning you are not prepared to give?

Mara: "Ken Kirkby: A Painter's Quest for Canada" opens that reckoning in the wilderness. The excerpt describes a night under the northern lights: "It was as if we were laying on the floor of a cathedral the size of the universe. The earth was no longer an issue — we weren't even part of the planet. I can see how religions began."

Pip: A man who locks himself in a studio for seven months to finish a painting after an experience like that — that's not dedication, that's a response to having seen something you can't unfold into ordinary language.

Mara: "He Rode Tall" puts a son back at his estranged father's grave on the prairie and lands on something quieter but just as large: "Joel recognized that your dad is always your dad. No matter what." The bitterness is still there; so is the prayer.

Pip: Grief and grievance occupying exactly the same space. That's the whole novel in one sentence.

Mara: "The Unquiet Land" takes the reckoning into the church. Padraig, a priest whose past the village has never accepted, stands at the sacristy door knowing the congregation at the wedding ahead of him would come "their long knives drawn, their wild teeth gleaming like the fangs of wolves." The community's memory is longer than his redemption.

Pip: A priest haunted by his own congregation. That is a specific and very old kind of loneliness.

Mara: "Small Change" gives us Rick, a boy who out-argues a nun about the nature of sin and voluntary participation, and simply quits. "The Circle" follows a spy arranging his own exit, weighing contingencies over breakfast at the Sheraton. "Fury of the Wind" slows everything down to a saddle, a jar of cream, a kiss on a cheek — Ben's first gift to Sarah, now something she intends to keep.

Pip: A saddle cream on a windowsill as the axis of a relationship. Fiction earns its keep in the small things.

Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" holds the same domestic scale — Tyne waking to sleet, the smell of coffee, a friend who took a leave of absence just to sit nearby. Loyalty measured in presence, not in words.

Pip: All of these characters are navigating what they owe each other — and the landscape outside keeps pressing in on that question.

Nature, Weather, And Landscape

Pip: The natural world in this work is never just backdrop — it watches, it judges, and occasionally it outlasts everyone in the scene.

Mara: "Vespers" makes that explicit: "Ethereal spruce stands guarding our home secrets without her armour having lonely eyes, an assuming smile between arthritic limbs as if to remind me of duties that one performs without being asked, without being paid."

Pip: A tree with arthritic limbs and a sense of duty. Nature as the only reliable volunteer.

Mara: "Mythography" follows a creek answering the river rocks — it is going to the great Ocean, to melt and become "a whiff of air pasted on an autumn day, turning to a wish in the heart of a young lover." And "Wheat Ears" brings the landscape indoors, to a graveside: a dead cousin who seems ready to rise and sit by the sidewalk, and the living person balancing on a tightrope, naked from the waist down, trying to understand what the dead require.

Pip: The creek knows where it's going. The living, considerably less so.

Mara: What holds all of this together is the idea that looking inward and looking outward are the same motion — the exile, the body, the grave on the prairie, the spruce in the yard.

Pip: Poetry as homeland. That phrase from the Introspection review keeps coming back. Next time, we find out what else this site considers home.