Carmine Lullabies

A bookworm publication would like to invite you to the launch of the poetry book entitled "Carmine Lullabies" written by Marilena Zackheos.

"Carmine Lullabies" is a collection of ruminations about one-on-one intimate encounters. It signals a coming-of-age trajectory, specifically in terms of the ways loss is managed by the work’s many female personas. Anger, bargaining, depression, denial, and acceptance are all part of this processing.

About the author:
Marilena Zackheos has published on postcolonial literary and cultural studies, psychoanalysis and trauma, gender and sexuality. She is coeditor of a collection of essays entitled “Vile Women: Female Evil in Fact, Fiction, and Mythology” (2014) and has translated a number of poems from Greek to English. Her creative writing has appeared in literary journals in Cyprus and abroad. She is an active member of Literary Agency Cyprus, a group that promotes the Anglophone literatures of Cyprus, as well as of Whirling Words, a Literary Agency Cyprus project for women writers in Cyprus and for women writers with a connection to the island. She teaches poetry at Write CY. She is a member of the non-profits Cyprus Academic Dialogue and the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research. She is also a musician. Her music album “Oh My” is expected in 2016 under the band name Grendel Babies. Zackheos works as Director of The Cyprus Center for Intercultural Studies and is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Nicosia.

About the collection:
The work is unmistakably nocturnal: with crystallized morsels of sensuality, nightmarish truths, and vignettes of tranquilizing calm. With unexpected moments of dark humor, epigrammatic poem endings, and what writer Maria A. Ioannou has called “rhythmical microcosms flirting with fiery images,” Carmine Lullabies strives to trigger strong emotions in its reader.

“No half-self remains indifferent,” Marilena Zackheos writes in “Venus de Milo,” and “Carmine Lullabies”¬ offers a series of vexed, nocturnal berceuse to the partial, chimerical, and mythic selves that inhabit bodies, particularly the bodies of women. By turns worldly and vulnerable, terrified and terrifying, scarified and tattooed, there is no topic—suicide, murder, prostitution, sado-masochism, gender—beyond the pale of Zackheos’s unflinching voice. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, she deals her pretty words like blades. The intent of these primal lullabies is not to lull us but to awaken us to the truth that, however melancholy and broken we may be, “the remainder is heavy and dense as love.”
– LISA RUSS SPAAR, poet

There are poets you read to reaffirm what you already know and have felt, and poets that pick up William Wordsworth by the tail and spin him over their heads in a bar. Literally. Which makes reading Marilena Zackheos’ debut poetry collection “Carmine Lullabies” a little like walking around a familiar room in the dark. The furniture is all there and the same, but the walls and floor are bent and there is a dangerous, insidious, leather-clad voice whispering at you from the shadows. If you let it inside, it will go right for your spine. Or think of Zackheos’ poetic world as a Gothic repurposing of ancient Greek myth, distilled backwards through medieval and Renaissance reworkings—and a lot of scarification, lonely sex and bad memories—and laid out on a plate like a Mannerist still life. At its core, though, Zackheos, who uses the sharp side of language, dissects (or should I say vivisects) the fear that clings to our emotional transactions expertly and convincingly. “Carmine Lullabies” should be read by every lover who thinks he knows what his lovers are thinking about in bed in the dark after sex.
– MAX SHERIDAN, writer – Director of Write CY

This striking debut collection offers a honed poetry of scars and depths, laced with flashes of lyricism and unsparing insight. Wielding “blades and words,” these contemporary vignettes and rewritten mythologies probe both trauma and power as they feel their way toward tenderness. The strength of the collection lies not just in its edgy, innovative language but in its embrace of both dark and light, injury and healing. As one poem notes, in a kind of poetic credo: “If this day were to be auctioned off I’d wish to take it inside. As in a verse,/ I would pray for one edge to cut, I would pray for the second to consecrate.” With its doubled consciousness and hard-earned knowledge, “Carmine Lullabies” indeed both cuts and consecrates.
– LISA SUHAIR MAJAJ, poet and writer

Marilena Zackheos’s new anthology brings an original voice to Cypriot English poetry. The sharp and racy cadences of her poetry are critical and playful, the images surprise with sudden paradoxical turns, small explosions of discourse explore how we discover each other as people and as lovers, how we relate to places and objects, what we hold on to and what we let go.
– STEPHANOS STEPHANIDES, poet

A provocative addition to the world of Anglophone literatures of Cyprus, Zackheos’s poetry marks her as one of the emerging unique voices determined to write things differently. Powerful, naked, straight-forward, gritty, with no self-pity or victimhood. A touch of irony, tenderness, uncertainty, rock-chick vs. the little girl… the voice of the women of her time. She is in control or is she… and does it matter? I am glad to be sharing platforms with her.
– AYDIN MEHMET ALI, Director/Founder of Literary Agency Cyprus, writer, activist, translator

“Carmine Lullabies” is haunted by “a girl who talks of holy water and dirt.” She is an Alice, a Kālī, a Minthe, an Echo, a Heurodis, a Lady of Shalott. She is a self with no restraints to transform vastly in a modern world. The verses are polymorphic and multi-textured, self-reflective and philosophical, lyrical and cynical, mythological and autobiographical.
– EFTYCHIA PANAYIOTOU, poet

In the poetry of Marilena Zackheos, words, like feelings, are sharp—they scratch, they slice, they bruise, they penetrate their reader’s unsuspecting mind—and at points, when they choose, they reveal their fragility: a longing to be touched on the skin or the heart.
– MARIA A. IOANNOU, writer

The most anti-erotic of erotic poetry, this new collection of verses is an edgy addition to Anglophone Cypriot poetry.
– STAVROS LAMBRAKIS, poet

The launch of Marilena Zackheos’s poetry book will take place on the 20th of February 2016, 20:00 at Prozac Café in Nicosia.

Master of Ceremonies is writer Max Sheridan who will give a brief introduction.

Expect the author to stir you with an unapologetic performance of her poetry.

A book signing will follow.

Atmospheric “lullabies” will be curated by musician and DJ Maria Panosian before and after the reading to set the “carmine” mood.

The book design is the work of graphic designer Annie Damianou.

«Carmine Lullabies»
Author: Marilena Zackheos
Genre: Poetry
Publisher: a bookworm publication
ISBN: 978-9963-2055-7-8
Pages: 72
Language: English