Joy Manesiotis
Revoke

Layered in overlapping movements, Revoke draws on the poet’s early training in visual art and film, as well as the form of the lament in Greek culture, both ancient and contemporary. Poem by poem, the collection becomes symphonic, rising and falling through cycles of multivocality, sound, repetition, and silence. Levels of loss—of mothers and mothering, of the complexities of female agency—are sounded and measured in fragmented, cinematic shifts between image and event as if to investigate how discursive gestures and the lyric, when fractured, can turn in tension to refute linearity, yet still create vivid moments of human time and experience. Revoke shows us how the epic can be embodied in lyric form, holding all and telling all, with the precision, beauty, and complexity that grief, and all human experience, deserves.

Cover design: Beth Ford
ISBN: 978-1-950404-12-4
Paperback: $18
Publication date: October 1, 2023

Joy Manesiotis is the author of two other poetry collections, A Short History of Anger, which won The New Measure Poetry Prize from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press and They Sing to Her Bones, which won The New Issues Poetry Prize. Currently, she is staging A Short History of Anger: A Hybrid Work of Poetry & Theatre—comprised of a Speaker and Greek Chorus—at international festivals and universities in the U.S. and Europe.

Praise for Revoke

With gorgeous results, Revoke recreates ancient rituals for our contemporary grief by excavating twin losses: a mother’s death and a woman’s reckoning with her own infertility. The prologue introduces how both losses begin, of that moment when biological randomness creates fate, what if, in the shadow life of the body, a million processes/ firing in all directions—unseen, internal—one direction/ goes off track. And so we enter a world where present-day, medicalized griefs are the stuff of high lyric form, with much beauty and humility. Here the natural world is an opportunity for divination, a hole,/a crow-shaped tear//in the fabric of air. Here, traditional dances, both the solo Greek zeibekiko and the tango, the famous dance of couples, act as ritual, too: the dance, its rotation of grief, its dark energy. In a moving conclusion, Manesiotis describes the Greek funeral ritual where the bones of the deceased are exhumed and washed in wine after five years. Strikingly, the poems in Revoke perform the rituals Manesiotis, and all of us, still need.

—Connie Voisine, author of The Bower and Calle Florista

Revoke is the rare lyric marvel by a poet who understands the serious task of writing at the threshold: of what is known and unknowable, what is said and unsayable, that shadow scrim between life and death. Joy Manesiotis not only dwells at these fine edges, she discovers there, and she makes from it a delicate and precise singing all her own. Marry{ing} spirit to matter, her poems simultaneously reach toward a dying mother and the body’s struggle to become a mother, and act as both witness and interior pulse, the body revolving on itself. Against the ocean’s constant background, the internal force of lament turns and turns, physically through the dancing of her Greek culture and tango practice with her partner, and through the exquisite mind of this book that is capable and generous enough to gather the infinities of endless movements. This is a work of great attention, vigor, and accomplishment.

—Jennifer Sweeney, author of Little Spells and Foxlogic, Fireweed

Excerpt from Revoke

This 

is grass, this a table, this a tree.
All nod: yes, yes (complacent, assured)

but a shadow slides over it, over the whole
known world: not a tree, a shadow tree, and the black crows
big as cats who strut at its feet are the real messengers,
jabbing for grubs, clasping the smooth ovals of pecans in their beaks,

(the witness speaks a mirror movement)

or if not messengers, then what?  A figure
too neat, easily assimilated, just a way to fit the unknown 
into our lexicon: to name: feel safer: accommodate

What if, in the shadow life of the body, a million processes
firing in all directions—unseen, internal—one direction
goes off track, strikes out on its own path—
a cell thinking for itself

This: crow, this: elementary school

This: a mother who knows what she knows.  Whose insides churn all day.  Who
wants to sing the song of everything is all right.  Who watches like a hawk.

(the witness finds the stillness inside a bell)

This is just the usual how do I keep my child safe? song. She sees shadows
sliding over the lawn furniture, across the child’s bright head, 
the crisp sycamore leaves scattered over the grass.

All nod, yes, yes.  We agree.  We engage in the visible world
as if we know it is real.

This is the felicity of art.  The charade that it will save us.

The crows are big as dogs, they lumber across the street, they are the violinists
in the quartet, black suitcoats flapping as they play, half rising from their chairs.

Their feathers are layered, shiny: What else would you expect?  They lumber 
across the asphalt.  The oval shells of pecans are dun, wedging open yellow beaks.

Echinacea: The dawn cries open in a frost of cornflowers: Plath said that.  
Something like that.  

One cell an errant explorer, a runaway: we can’t see it take its turn, 
off the track.

The crape myrtle’s firework of pink,
its shatterings, its ashes, skirted on the ground.

No, it was a forest of frost, a dawn of cornflowers.

(The habit of language cranking up.)

The blaze of pink, the oversized commas of shiny black
hiccup across the field of pink, the lemon of their beaks: 
They barely turn as the child runs toward them.

By agreeing, can we believe it into being? 

Her mother floats in her bed in the Intensive Care Unit,
a boat on calm water.  She is in another world.

(the witness looks to the sky)

Sycamore leaves, an arroyo of green and darker green, shifting backdrop
riding a late breeze, the theatre of afternoon.

It is the illusion of time.  That it is linear.  That it moves forward, a trajectory.
That there is a future.

She doesn’t float.  A moth pinned to the display sheet.  Sheet of bed.  
What time is it? she asks.  She looks out the window.  
Is it night or day?

That it is a fancy bed doesn’t matter.