Nostos

In Anastasia Vassos' beautiful chapbook, Nostos, we braid home through Greek myth and memory, through family and our lives today-I'm concerned there's less time than ever,/convinced there's more poetry everywhere. In Vassos' poems, "ordinary days" mix with the mystical, moments where God is in the grocery store stacking pomegranates and a speaker saying prayers/to the so-called dead. In Nostos, story is everywhere. Who am I to complain of loneliness? she asks as we find ourselves alive after a pandemic, in "Achilles in the Twentieth Century." These engaging poems captivate and return to family-On her last visit to Greece/my mother and her two sisters/left a note in the elbow of an almond tree. Vassos' poems profoundly speak to yesterday, today, and tomorrow reminding us of home and returning-My father used to say/the best part/of the journey/was coming home. These poems are a homecoming-let these poems bring you back.

-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)

These poems sing as the ancients did: of hungers and heroes and homecomings, of trials and triumph and loss. With tales from Ancient Greece as her guide, Vassos navigates a modern life, celebrating the abundance of her lineages even while recounting woes. As we negotiate "the unmuscled arm of Ohio," Boston, and, of course, the Aegean, we revel in the "Ordinary Days" and exceptional histories she renders with stylistic grace and lasting imagery. These poems entertain nostalgia and yet are urgent and present, driven by the knowledge that "there's less time than ever," and certain of poetry's necessity in the face of it. Here Vassos stands upon the shoulders of beloved poets, modern and ancient alike, and weaves her own beautiful tales that we are better for having read.

-Amanda Moore, author of Requeening

The poems of Anastasia Vassos' Nostos are deeply scored with a clear-eyed tenderness and a sharp poetics. This book is rich with poems finely wrought and wise about family, loss, and the visions we have of home and ancient lands. Vassos' poems shine with gorgeousness and grit, each one rising "above the temporary earth / tail swagging / in the wind colors / translucent against sun's lariat." This is a very fine book.

-Christopher Salerno, author of The Man Grave