Goat, Goddess, Moon

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.

Catherine Strisik, poet, teacher, editor is author of The Mistress (3: A Taos Press, 2016, awarded New Mexico/AZ Book Award for Poetry 2017); Thousand-Cricket Song (Plain View Press, 2010, second edition 2016); and chapbook: Insectum Gravitis (Main Street Rag, 2019, finalist New Mexico/AZ Book Award 2020). She is co-founder and editor of Taos Journal of Poetry, was Taos, New Mexico’s Poet Laureate 2020- 2021, as well as the recipient of a Taoseña Award as Woman of Impact for literary contribution in northern N.M. Strisik is a Pushcart nominee with over 30 years of publications with poetry translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. Currently she divides her time between Cape Ann, MA and Taos, New Mexico where she has lived for over 40 years offering editorial consultations for essayists and poets and facilitates both private and small group poetry workshops.