Goat, Goddess, Moon

A Greek American poet's spirited search for the origins of her name becomes a gateway to self-discovery.

Everyone has a name that comes from somewhere. Greek American poet Catherine Strisik's brilliant fourth collection, Goat, Goddess, Moon, is a deeply personal search to uncover the roots of her given name. In poems that originate in Crete and Thessaloniki, Greece, and in northern New Mexico's San Cristobal and Taos, Strisik, like an archeologist, revisits and reimagines the ancestral Greek villages that are her imprint of origin and reveal the love that endures. Herein are poems that include the Greek language, the speaker's early tongue and that of her ancestors: Maybe agape is what we mean/ agape on the edge of Fortetsa to bend/Yes bend closer/mythed/unmythed. These bold, body-centered poems explore villages, labyrinths, and the given name Aikaterίna found in myth, love, desire, superstition, beauty, the physicality of woman/goddess, elemental bodies of landscape/waters, and a mystical camaraderie with abandoned wild dogs, cats, and sacrificial goats. This is a journey of self-discovery, one that fully embraces family origins and a celebratory arrival:

Wake up Wake up and still spring, and the goats

they bleat Hariklea, Andreas, Sultana, Ourania, Nausicaa and from my basil bowl too

the bones resembling

say it

Katerίna

Yes. and yes.