La "Emigration" is a fiery poetic body where language functions as a means of representation and a mechanism of stripping away the post-junta and late neoliberal reality. The reader, like an observer in a documentary, encounters commodified bodies, cultural fossils, and remnants of power. Language reveals the regime of widespread decay and absurdity. The body records exploitation, desire, and historical trauma; narrates the experience of migration and alienation; and constructs an anti-space where language becomes a field of conflict between the private and the collective, the sacred and the profane, vividly and ironically capturing the violent fluidity of modern Greek (and globalized) experience.

POEMS FROM THE BOOK

Marco communist, Marco Christian socialist,
scandal of the Church and editor
under surveillance, Marco an attribution without signature,
clad in the boredom of a senator who sacralizes
senators wrapping structures and expulsions
with progress reports, Marco a bullet for reception
and a bullet for warning, Marco a baton
on patrol, Marco a snitch and hypocrite, neutral,
with the hysteria of mediocrity and legs
in the trap, give the foreigner to Joseph,
the foreigner is poison in the well, give
the black fugitive, sweeping and scissors,
death is a doorman from Yerevan,
stamps with Turkish words, my race, my race
betrayed at the checkpoints, race
my heretical at the barricade, they bring iron
from the brothels of Smyrna, come on Demirgüluntan,
Marco, your accomplices sing from spasms
the killer, share pills and passports, no one
remains behind in the religion of your religion:
God swears to kill, God doesn’t ask.

Lord, the killer
with the stars of the dead
on the frozen forehead
you who distributed madness
to the beast of the people
you who tore down the city
with the hand of a usurer
protect my brothers from
tears and saints
give the wrath from the blood
of my mother
[I have no other seed]
and don’t
say I broke
I am a stranger before you
like every father.