Holy Cow! Press, 2025
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.
“In a Greek kitchen everything turns translucent” sings Catherine Strisik in a characteristic line of pure lucidity that’s both plainspoken and exalted. But in her poem about the familial soup that’s called Magirίtsa, the kitchen stove grows darker with tribal, smoky origins: “I taste their entrails / and organs their / sacrifice at midnight // our tongue.” This kind of verbal richness is there to savor in every exquisite verse of this book, a book truth-tested on the tongue like an ancient family recipe. The seriousness and sensuality, expressed with gorgeous lyric expertise are reminiscent of the great Greek poet Odysseus Elytis. In the weaving back and forth between cultures, between the pain of loss and aging and the joys of love and travel, Strisik is as much a travel guide of the heart as she is an initiate of the mysteries. On the island of Crete, a simple passing greeting of “good evening” becomes a little ode of gratitude: “When I stop what I’m doing, what appears like nothing really, a walk, / and listen, their kalispera / my kalispera in unison kalispera.” This singular voice, alive to its time and place, teems with a quiet, ancestral chorus.
~George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos
At the center of Strisik’s lush collection is her desire to be called her Greek name: Katerína— Her poems lead us on a journey, through the sensuous “holy body,” and communion of family:“my grandmother always knelt in the chamomile” and the land itself, “the sacred spray from the Cretan Sea”, the sparkle of light on waves, small boys and goats, the bloom of a white orchid, thousand year history wrapped in her grandfather’s voice. Her poems are tactile, filled with desire, earthy and visionary, echos of the past, the music of the Greek. All the while, beneath and between is her naming: Aikaterína is a large scope of a poem at the root of the book, in the mouth and body and memory, as she writes: “Katerina is my Greek name/murmured and body plentiful/aroused red below bath water’s….my woman’s hope.
~Veronica Golos, author of GIRL
In the third poem of her new book, Catherine Strisik imagines what her Greek ancestor carried in his pocket—"…soil from Trapezítsa, or wheat wrapped in fabric from his mother's hem." It is sustenance for the journey of an immigrant offspring born in a new world, signposting her way back to the source of her strength, her lineal makeup and her presence.
Food and language are the travel codes, and Strisik learns the ingredients and the right pronunciations, down to the saying and meaning of her own name. Goat Goddess Moon—they keep company in her poems, making them scalers of great heights, mythical, and full of light.
~Mervyn Taylor, author of Getting Through: New & Selected poems.
In Goat, Goddess, Moon, Catherine Strisik returns us to the villages and rituals of a Greece where time is marked by what’s passed down, in anecdotes, recipes, and the ways particular Greek words like psomi (bread) and aromatiko (perfumed) will rekindle lineages. It is in the kitchens, landscapes, and myths that a particularly feminine sensibility is claimed in words, and names, that travel between languages and terrains as "Greek women form//the most beautiful/mouths when speaking.”
~Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of The re in Refuge
Goat, Goddess, Moon lovingly traces a lineage through history, myth, and new experience. ‘I speak broken Greek. We say fluent Greek,’ Strisik writes. ‘Say it. Say. While standing/ on your head: the Greek alphabet.’ These poems— part tender probe of heritage and part ancestral elegy—revel in sumptuous food, the body and the sea. With its nourishing glimpses of identity this collection will encourage any reader to more closely embrace their own cultural inheritance.
~Lauren Camp, New Mexico State Poet Laureate (2022-2025), author of In Old Sky
$18 + s&h
Main Street Rag, 2019
Finalist NM/ AZ Book Award in Poetry, 2020
...investigations of desires (dangerous) and borders (subject to diffusion and breakdown). And they are boldly pitched above the literal, over which they nonetheless lower their stingers.
~Calvin Bedient
“Dignity” is one of the most important connotations of the Latin word “gravitis.” Catherine Strisik in her Insectum Gravitis explores the dignity of not only the world of winged and crawling insects. In these uncanny, metamorphic parables, she also shows us how the infinitely varied dance of love and desire is a fundamental source of the dignity to be found and cherished in you and me and every living thing.
~Fred Marchant
“Do what we can the summer will have its flies,” wrote Emerson. In Insectum Gravitis, Cathy Strisik makes out of those flies and that heat transcendent poetry. A sequence of poems that offers pleasures far deeper than those of science or story, her sly and witty book offers a vision of a relationship: brief, intense, and as complicated as an insect’s compound eyes—which, unlike ours, can see every direction.
~Natasha Sajé
Insectum Gravitis is haunted by the missing, by the spaces between, by anticipation and longing, the subtleties of transparency, and the dangers of allowing intimacy into our lives. An intensely human, deeply emotional view weaves through this collection ostensibly focusing on invertebrates. Catherine Strisik’s language is stark, compelling. It resonates with wonder and variety, and inevitably leads us from the immediate to the beyond. This is a gorgeous, powerful collection. It will lift you.
~Robert Okaji
3: A Taos Press, 2016
NM/AZ Book Award in Poetry, 2017
These breathtaking poems bypass the careful brain to speak a purer, distilled language of the body. Sensuous, keening, celebratory, they do more than create a chorus of voices that transform the progress of Parkinson’s Disease into a kind of Greek play, although that would have been achievement enough. Poem by poem, Strisik breaks syntax and remakes it into gestures that startle and invite the reader to linger, and into cadences that reflect emotions too complex to name but are immediately searing. This collection itself is body and breath: It brings us to language by a hidden door we may not have known was there, and in this sense, it is challenging yet trustworthy at every moment.
~Leslie Ullman, Progress on the Subject of Immensity
“Grief swells inside silks,” Strisik writes in her latest collection of poems The Mistress. Indeed, eroticism mingles with deception, tenderness is interrupted by violence, & physical pleasure dissolves into the slow deterioration of the mind brought on by disease, among the other sources. Strisik’s lines—in turns taut, frenetic, & fragmented—surprise over & over, revealing the myriad fissures of language & lives rocked by seduction, equally alluring & toxic. These are daring, & successful because of their daring, poems.
~Alexander Long, Still Life
Eros and Pathos infuse this uncommonly unified collection—a coherent, albeit polysemic, verse narrative—with a linguistic power that educes as much erotic energy and spiritual passion as it presents. Catherine Strisik trusts the profoundly suggestive reach of the poetic—the ongoing reach of the parabolic word—to address the body’s decline and in so doing articulates a vision of the spirit’s recovery.
~Scott Cairns, Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems
Just as a mistress steals attention, unsettles a marriage, and relentlessly and invisibly gains power over a spouse, so this “mistress,” Parkinson’s disease, does and more. Like a mistress, the disease transforms both the speaker’s marriage and her psyche. From denial and self-deception, to awareness of betrayal (“I hate her molestation/her grasp on his calf, her/blood pressure—/her peacock pulse”), this collection is astonishing in its psychological truth-telling, masterful in its use of innovative voice and form, and unforgettable in its depiction of the embodied haunting of a disease. As the speaker notes: “Everywhere this/haunt seizes him” and “Now, we’re/always endangered/even here.” The heightening of the couple’s body-bond and sensual engagement (“Kiss me/With your light-blue-god-thirst”) is made exquisitely poignant in relation to the threat of its disappearance. A powerful, memorable collection.
~Joan Houlihan, Ay
Cathy Strisik’s The Mistress articulates from every angle the ongoing devastation and salvaged redemptions of Parkinson’s disease. The afflicted husband, the grieving wife, the disease itself (as mistress), the implicated pesticide, the neurologist, the medicine each have their say in poems written from alternating points of view and distinguished by marked emotional intelligence and fearlessness. At the core of the book is the desire to “speak the unspeakable,” whether it is awe or violence, love’s joy or love’s pain.
~Carol Moldaw, So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems
Plain View Press, 2010
2nd edition, 2016
The keen eye of compassion in each detail, the steady touch of its cadence in each unfolding line.
~Olga Broumas, Rave: Poems
Here is a perfect, clean and delicate (powerful and often terrifying) work of art. In its simplicity lies profound emotion, both beautiful and laden with sadness. These masterful slim poems speak with discipline and exquisite fervor. This is a very moving portrait of a land, its people, and the universal human spirit.
~John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War
