It begins in Amygdaliés, her great grandmother’s village in north-central Greece. Here, the opening poem discloses, is the love/poem with the seed,/the source of what was/buried and what was dug/what is nutrient. Amygdaliés is aptly named with the Greek word for “almond,” which also designates the almond-shaped biological structure in the human brain that connects emotion to memory. Just so, poems redolent of memory and emotion chronicle a search for home, family, and identity in Catherine Strisik’s new poetry collection, Goat, Goddess, Moon.

The collection is a love story, or perhaps a love song, since its first poem, “Seed,” declares: This is not a story,/more the truth. Strisik’s poems plumb the depths of this truth with what I think of as her trademark techniques: provocative line breaks, fluid syntax with minimal punctuation, and colorful language that finds the aesthetic overlap between vivid particulars and emotive abstractions. Goat, Goddess, Moon explores the truth of her search, through dirt, tears and blood, encompassing the full scope of experience in both its beauty and its strangeness.

Strisik organizes Goat, Goddess, Moon into three sections: My Villages, My Labyrinth, and My Name. The first two sections establish a sense of place. Section one immerses the reader in the locations of her grandparents’ homes, Amygdaliés and Trapezítsa in north-central Greece. Section two centers on Heraklion on the island of Crete, the location of the mythical minotaur in the labyrinth. The poems probe local foods, customs, and family connections, interlaced with contemporary experiences. The book’s final section offers the fullest and most sensual expression of the poet’s search for renewed identity in the repeated utterance of her own name, Katerína.

Strisik’s new collection advances her already richly developed poetic skill. Her first poetry collection, Thousand Cricket Song (2010, 2016, Plain View), confronts the aftermath of unspeakable horror in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, yet finds exquisite beauty there. About the skulls of “Tuol Sleng Prison,” she writes, “When I press/my ear to their jaws, crab//shells and dried rice drop out./Then their smells rise to me:/lemongrass, coriander,//mint leaves.” In The Mistress (2016, Three: A Taos Press), Strisik characterizes a spouse’s debilitating disease as a marriage interloper. As the disease steals the beloved in macabre ways, Strisik’s poems hold on to hope. Her heartbreaking poem, “Hotel Belvedere, and the Wife Whispers” affirms, “the November moon//one night away from full/choking me/the moon far from ordinary radiating its sureness.//Even so, I am capable of music.” From that sublime scope, Strisik turns in her next book to the weight of insects (Insectum Gravitis, 2019, Main Street Rag), demonstrating her fascination with the small, the ordinary, and the neglected dimensions of experience: Prominent beak, an orange//cloak, the pillowed//rhododendron quiet/wait, you//bite me yes bite me (“Kissing Bug Declares”).

Equipped with such effective tools, Goat, Goddess, Moon amplifies the dimensions of a primary metaphor for Strisik, lovemaking. Her poems reflect experience in sensual terms of touch, desire, and interpenetration. Describing a first encounter with goat stew, for example, “27 Romanou” confesses, I wanted to be stroked/moist with the Cretan Sea. “Pulp” observes that a feral cat fails to sense My need to sway I mean//swoon. My nipples, or the peculiar/mouth/for love’s sake/is so often in command like the alphabet/in any language. Noting the kitchen furniture, “Aikaterína” describes a … walnut table/I confess I’ve never made love/on though it is as wide and long/as a full-size bed…. Her title poem, “Goat, Goddess, Moon,” recounts, So aroused I’d become by the goat-tending/myth I could see the grainy grasses on her/tongue at the food bin…. I was kissed/by a goat last night on my right hand the wire/fence sharp/the three-quarter/moon a bright lantern. “Agora” declares and repeats, I love what I love.

As in her previous collections, Strisik’s poetic vision here encompasses the full scope of experience, including its seamy aspects, such as “Upon Seeing a Used Condom on the Ground.” “Labyrinth” describes being bitten by a dog and “Centuries Old Kako Mati” tells the story of an old gypsy in the Thessaloniki Bus Terminal who gives the speaker the evil eye. “Taverna Zaxaris at Paleokastro Beach” details an encounter with a cat who is missing an eye. Even in that distressing scene, the poem finds compassion: I want to know who/prays, who weeps, who shovels//the sediment when his body/is no fur, is no bone. When his voice//is silent.

Several poems (“In My Grandfather’s Living Room,” “Kaliméra, Kaliméra,” “kalispera,” Goat, Goddess Moon,” “Ceremony, A Kind of Greek Woman”) register a point of pride in Greece, the sounds of the Greek language. Noting the similar sound of Greek “good morning” to the poet’s name, “Kaliméra, Kaliméra” prefigures the sustained exploration of sound and meaning in the book’s final section where the poet’s journey culminates. “White Orchid” remembers, In certain southwestern light I am all the faces of my past. But in Crete’s “Humid Weather,” no one sees me as real, and I see no one else as real, either. There, I am/raw to the primal.

The long sequence “Aikatérina” tumbles out a cascade of sensual detail that reverberates with the sound of the poet’s name. It states, sometimes the sound of my name in Greek is the Christmas cactus in my dining room that blooms three times a year, so the sequence utters the name over and over, in Greek, in English, in Greek letters and with the letters of the English alphabet. Its sound, the poem announces, is love. The collection ends with renewal, but renewal bloodied and weighted with memory. “Bone Cavity” asks, … who can bear it—can you bear it can you/bare it—the familial blue//extravagant shudder? It is spring. And finally, in “Me of Me:” My face carries my weight/like a prayer nailed half-mast to a flagpole.

Goat, Goddess, Moon teems with sensuality. Aromas, textures, tastes, sights, and sounds swell the achievement of identity in a place both foreign and familiar. A mature expression of a developed sense of self, Catherine Strisik’s collection will inspire and delight.

Margaret Lee, poet, scholar, fiber artist, watercolor sketcher, and aspiring naturalist in Tulsa, Oklahoma

August 23, 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

...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

‍

‍‍

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

​

‍