Following his award-winning *He, the Lower Sky*, Yannis Antiochos returns with a work that refracts the world as a post-war landscape. A realm not literal, but existential, historical, spiritual and thus linguistic. Poetry that offers no solace but functions as a black box of human finitude. Scenes of war, fragments of memory, digital traces, theological fissures, bodies in disarray. A dense archive of fragments that moves on the fringes of language and faith. A poetics of the end that seeks not understanding but inclusion in the bewilderment of the present.
Author:
Yiannis Antiochou
Inner frontispiece:
Leda Kontogiannopoulou
Edited by:
Dimitris Athenakis
Date of publication:
04/05/2026
Pages:
88
Dimensions:
16,8 x 24 εκ.
ISBN:
978-960-572-836-6
Publication:
2026
Categories:
Literature, Books, Poetry
This collection adds to the significant body of work produced by Yiannis Antiochou. His images, original as ever, reveal the bloody world of the present—a modern apocalypse whose roots, however, lie in the past. His intertextual readings of Seferis, Eliot, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, Rimbaud, and many others form part of the poet's cosmology, while remaining thoroughly genuine, deeply personal, and brilliantly assimilated poetically."
– To Vima
Giannis Antiochou may experiment with his verses, form, intertextuality, and ideas—not because he needs to impress, but because he is a very capable poet, "comfortable" with his material.
– K MagazineA key characteristic of these poems is that they are permeated by a sense of cultural decay, a prevailing mood of subversion, and a kind of nostalgia for a lost homeland—not in the narrow sense of a paternal place, which is betrayed by references to the past. Yet, this current fixation on and coddling of a nightmare is humanly impossible; for while certain images of resignation—ranging from moral decadence to psychological illusion—are symptoms of personal slippage, they are, at the same time, connected to the broader external climate that prevails.
– Eirini Karagiannidou, Neo PlanodionThe collection constantly returns to the fundamental anxiety: what does it mean to remember? And even more, what does it mean to survive within what you remember? And ultimately, perhaps this is the most disturbing yet also the most truthful element of the collection: that the apocalypses we dream of do not belong to the end of the world, but to the way we are already experiencing it.
– Irini Vakalopoulou, FractalYiannis Antiochou
Yannis Antiochou is a poet and translator. He was born in Athens in 1969. He grew up and lives in Piraeus. He holds an MBA and an MSc from the Medical School of the University of Athens, specialising in Intensive Care Units.
With Ikaros, he has published the poetry collections *He, the Lower Sky* (2019) [2020 State Poetry Prize], *Dissolution* (2017), *Exhalations* (2014) and *Inhalations* (2009).
He has translated works by T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton and Anna Akhmatova, and has contributed to various literary journals, publishing poems, essays and translations (ANTI, Index, Poetry, Dekata, Delear, Mandragoras, Poetix).
