CALLIOPE, poetry by Hilary Sideris
Publication Date: October 30, 2024
Paperback, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-87-5
Titling a book after the muse of poetry and music might seem a gutsy move – though one that Hilary Sideris handles adeptly in her new collection – but this also was the name of her Greek grandmother transplanted to the American midwest (“unsmiling in her heavy black”), and thus a portal into family and memory and not always pleasant history. More so even than typical for poetry, this book is all about language, or languages, the intersection of cultures and lives living on in words, and more specifically in names. Including her own rather eccentric name: recalling that she was “a sullen child” – “I wasn’t / joyful, glad in Latin, / propitious in Greek” – she finds now “I age my way / into hilarity.” That hilarity, that joy, is evident throughout this collection, even when her subjects turn dark. An opening epigraph from the dictionary reminds us of another meaning of the title, naming an antique steam-powered musical instrument that once lured patrons over long distances to “showboats, circuses, and carnivals,” and this meaning is also apt as Sideris lures us across the world to witness the spectacle of her life. Appropriately, she leaves us in a small unfinished church in Greece, where “We’re beyond history. We have no / slot to put each other in.”
Praise for Hilary Sideris & Calliope
What with all the gods, myths, and tragedies to call on, Greek references can sometimes feel like a stab at gravitas. But there’s no Medea, no Oedipus here; Sideris has a freshness coupled with the innate grasp of someone raised in the Midwest with a Greek grandmother from Asia Minor who could read a fortune in a coffee cup. Greece slips in lightly (“If there was cake, / she’d take a ligo bit”), and sometimes heavily, like the violence in the last line of Chios, an echo of the massacre that moved Delacroix. Monumental Rome shows up with similar freshness; Sideris gives us the Rome of ’80s pop, of the football club and its underdog anthem. Italian and Greek weave in and out; the lean poems shimmer with sonic treats—Vasco’s da Bagno, da Gama, and Rossi. Margaret’s palikaria, kalamaria, and margaretaria. Calliope offers moments of humor, vulnerability, vindication, and ultimately vicarious satisfaction. Are readers meant to be rooting for poets? By the end of this collection, I was.
—Amber Charmei, author of “Six Poets Illuminating the Modern Greek Soul”
Hilary Sideris lives fully at the junction of several languages—her native English, a patrilineal Greek, and by deep affection, Italian. The poems here draw explicit and fascinating connections between language and history—both painful personal histories and the shared historical record. Calliope (Sideris’s own paternal grandmother’s name) is rich in lexical and historical detail, but not dry and academic. The poems in this volume accrete, as layers of resonance accumulate, and tantalizingly suggest that people may in fact “grow into their names, as into a suit” as an epigraph to the book notes. In Sideris’s precise music and short lines, poems can turn surprisingly on a single word or line break. I was left marveling at how a poet can be such a master of her own voice, all the while channeling, with humor and empathy, the voices of others, in other languages. Calliope is a delight to read—sharp, wistful, hilarious, and wise—and a meditation on word origins.
—Vasiliki Katsarou, author of Memento Tsunami & The Second Home, publisher at Solitude Hill Press
Calliope is a page-turner. Concise as these poems are, every event they describe comes with a penumbra, a wagon piled with free associations. In part, the book is an unsentimental memoir. Sideris gives her mother’s account of a rape “at Texas A&M / by men who slipped a Mickey in her Coke.” (A ruminative equanimity shares space with a third ear for violence.) At one moment, the wry psychology stands out (“we ride / the human conveyor belt / through concourses of blame / & when we land, you hate / how I stay seated, / I hate how you stand.” At other moments, it’s the punch of the language that seduces: “a mauve Evia olive,” “Cannibal pigeons peck a hot wing.” And among the telling objects that furnish these poems are words and names, radioactive nubs that Sideris wittily anatomizes. Unexpected swerves, unexpected connections: what a pleasure to spend time with this deft sensibility.
—Myra Malkin, author of Sunset Grand Couturier
About the Author
Hilary Sideris is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) Her poems appear in the anthologies Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, edited by Dean Kostos, and Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion and Social Justice, edited by Carol Alexander and Stephen Massimilla. She grew up in Indiana and lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a professional developer for CUNY Start, a program for underserved, limited-income students at The City University of New York.
Publication Date: October 30, 2024
Paperback, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-87-5
Titling a book after the muse of poetry and music might seem a gutsy move – though one that Hilary Sideris handles adeptly in her new collection – but this also was the name of her Greek grandmother transplanted to the American midwest (“unsmiling in her heavy black”), and thus a portal into family and memory and not always pleasant history. More so even than typical for poetry, this book is all about language, or languages, the intersection of cultures and lives living on in words, and more specifically in names. Including her own rather eccentric name: recalling that she was “a sullen child” – “I wasn’t / joyful, glad in Latin, / propitious in Greek” – she finds now “I age my way / into hilarity.” That hilarity, that joy, is evident throughout this collection, even when her subjects turn dark. An opening epigraph from the dictionary reminds us of another meaning of the title, naming an antique steam-powered musical instrument that once lured patrons over long distances to “showboats, circuses, and carnivals,” and this meaning is also apt as Sideris lures us across the world to witness the spectacle of her life. Appropriately, she leaves us in a small unfinished church in Greece, where “We’re beyond history. We have no / slot to put each other in.”
Praise for Hilary Sideris & Calliope
What with all the gods, myths, and tragedies to call on, Greek references can sometimes feel like a stab at gravitas. But there’s no Medea, no Oedipus here; Sideris has a freshness coupled with the innate grasp of someone raised in the Midwest with a Greek grandmother from Asia Minor who could read a fortune in a coffee cup. Greece slips in lightly (“If there was cake, / she’d take a ligo bit”), and sometimes heavily, like the violence in the last line of Chios, an echo of the massacre that moved Delacroix. Monumental Rome shows up with similar freshness; Sideris gives us the Rome of ’80s pop, of the football club and its underdog anthem. Italian and Greek weave in and out; the lean poems shimmer with sonic treats—Vasco’s da Bagno, da Gama, and Rossi. Margaret’s palikaria, kalamaria, and margaretaria. Calliope offers moments of humor, vulnerability, vindication, and ultimately vicarious satisfaction. Are readers meant to be rooting for poets? By the end of this collection, I was.
—Amber Charmei, author of “Six Poets Illuminating the Modern Greek Soul”
Hilary Sideris lives fully at the junction of several languages—her native English, a patrilineal Greek, and by deep affection, Italian. The poems here draw explicit and fascinating connections between language and history—both painful personal histories and the shared historical record. Calliope (Sideris’s own paternal grandmother’s name) is rich in lexical and historical detail, but not dry and academic. The poems in this volume accrete, as layers of resonance accumulate, and tantalizingly suggest that people may in fact “grow into their names, as into a suit” as an epigraph to the book notes. In Sideris’s precise music and short lines, poems can turn surprisingly on a single word or line break. I was left marveling at how a poet can be such a master of her own voice, all the while channeling, with humor and empathy, the voices of others, in other languages. Calliope is a delight to read—sharp, wistful, hilarious, and wise—and a meditation on word origins.
—Vasiliki Katsarou, author of Memento Tsunami & The Second Home, publisher at Solitude Hill Press
Calliope is a page-turner. Concise as these poems are, every event they describe comes with a penumbra, a wagon piled with free associations. In part, the book is an unsentimental memoir. Sideris gives her mother’s account of a rape “at Texas A&M / by men who slipped a Mickey in her Coke.” (A ruminative equanimity shares space with a third ear for violence.) At one moment, the wry psychology stands out (“we ride / the human conveyor belt / through concourses of blame / & when we land, you hate / how I stay seated, / I hate how you stand.” At other moments, it’s the punch of the language that seduces: “a mauve Evia olive,” “Cannibal pigeons peck a hot wing.” And among the telling objects that furnish these poems are words and names, radioactive nubs that Sideris wittily anatomizes. Unexpected swerves, unexpected connections: what a pleasure to spend time with this deft sensibility.
—Myra Malkin, author of Sunset Grand Couturier
About the Author
Hilary Sideris is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) Her poems appear in the anthologies Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, edited by Dean Kostos, and Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion and Social Justice, edited by Carol Alexander and Stephen Massimilla. She grew up in Indiana and lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a professional developer for CUNY Start, a program for underserved, limited-income students at The City University of New York.
Publication Date: October 30, 2024
Paperback, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-87-5
Titling a book after the muse of poetry and music might seem a gutsy move – though one that Hilary Sideris handles adeptly in her new collection – but this also was the name of her Greek grandmother transplanted to the American midwest (“unsmiling in her heavy black”), and thus a portal into family and memory and not always pleasant history. More so even than typical for poetry, this book is all about language, or languages, the intersection of cultures and lives living on in words, and more specifically in names. Including her own rather eccentric name: recalling that she was “a sullen child” – “I wasn’t / joyful, glad in Latin, / propitious in Greek” – she finds now “I age my way / into hilarity.” That hilarity, that joy, is evident throughout this collection, even when her subjects turn dark. An opening epigraph from the dictionary reminds us of another meaning of the title, naming an antique steam-powered musical instrument that once lured patrons over long distances to “showboats, circuses, and carnivals,” and this meaning is also apt as Sideris lures us across the world to witness the spectacle of her life. Appropriately, she leaves us in a small unfinished church in Greece, where “We’re beyond history. We have no / slot to put each other in.”
Praise for Hilary Sideris & Calliope
What with all the gods, myths, and tragedies to call on, Greek references can sometimes feel like a stab at gravitas. But there’s no Medea, no Oedipus here; Sideris has a freshness coupled with the innate grasp of someone raised in the Midwest with a Greek grandmother from Asia Minor who could read a fortune in a coffee cup. Greece slips in lightly (“If there was cake, / she’d take a ligo bit”), and sometimes heavily, like the violence in the last line of Chios, an echo of the massacre that moved Delacroix. Monumental Rome shows up with similar freshness; Sideris gives us the Rome of ’80s pop, of the football club and its underdog anthem. Italian and Greek weave in and out; the lean poems shimmer with sonic treats—Vasco’s da Bagno, da Gama, and Rossi. Margaret’s palikaria, kalamaria, and margaretaria. Calliope offers moments of humor, vulnerability, vindication, and ultimately vicarious satisfaction. Are readers meant to be rooting for poets? By the end of this collection, I was.
—Amber Charmei, author of “Six Poets Illuminating the Modern Greek Soul”
Hilary Sideris lives fully at the junction of several languages—her native English, a patrilineal Greek, and by deep affection, Italian. The poems here draw explicit and fascinating connections between language and history—both painful personal histories and the shared historical record. Calliope (Sideris’s own paternal grandmother’s name) is rich in lexical and historical detail, but not dry and academic. The poems in this volume accrete, as layers of resonance accumulate, and tantalizingly suggest that people may in fact “grow into their names, as into a suit” as an epigraph to the book notes. In Sideris’s precise music and short lines, poems can turn surprisingly on a single word or line break. I was left marveling at how a poet can be such a master of her own voice, all the while channeling, with humor and empathy, the voices of others, in other languages. Calliope is a delight to read—sharp, wistful, hilarious, and wise—and a meditation on word origins.
—Vasiliki Katsarou, author of Memento Tsunami & The Second Home, publisher at Solitude Hill Press
Calliope is a page-turner. Concise as these poems are, every event they describe comes with a penumbra, a wagon piled with free associations. In part, the book is an unsentimental memoir. Sideris gives her mother’s account of a rape “at Texas A&M / by men who slipped a Mickey in her Coke.” (A ruminative equanimity shares space with a third ear for violence.) At one moment, the wry psychology stands out (“we ride / the human conveyor belt / through concourses of blame / & when we land, you hate / how I stay seated, / I hate how you stand.” At other moments, it’s the punch of the language that seduces: “a mauve Evia olive,” “Cannibal pigeons peck a hot wing.” And among the telling objects that furnish these poems are words and names, radioactive nubs that Sideris wittily anatomizes. Unexpected swerves, unexpected connections: what a pleasure to spend time with this deft sensibility.
—Myra Malkin, author of Sunset Grand Couturier
About the Author
Hilary Sideris is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) Her poems appear in the anthologies Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, edited by Dean Kostos, and Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion and Social Justice, edited by Carol Alexander and Stephen Massimilla. She grew up in Indiana and lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a professional developer for CUNY Start, a program for underserved, limited-income students at The City University of New York.