Hilary has come visit twice the last two years. Both times, she was very precise with her stay. She stayed from 1st until 15th of May in 2023 and 2024 and she was primarily working on her poems. Some were influenced by her stay like Angeliki and Nerophidia. A few days ago, her new poems collection has been published under the name Calliope from Broadstone Books.
Calliope is the Muse who presides over eloquence and epic poetry; so called from the ecstatic harmony of her voice.
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.”
According to Myra Malkin, author of Sunset Grand Couturier, 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.
Vasiliki Katsarou, author of Memento Tsunami & The Second Home, thinks that Hilary lives fully at the junction of several languages—her native English, a patrilineal Greek, and by deep affection, Italian. The poems draw explicit and fascinating connections between language and history—both painful personal histories and the shared historical record. 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.
The book is available online at Broadstone Books website as a paperback. (Publication Date: October 30, 2024, ISBN: 978-1-956782-87-5).
We cannot describe how happy and proud we are for Hilary and her work as well as the fact that part of her collection has been fostered during her stay in our creative space.
A massive THANK YOU and a huge CONGRATULATIONS from the bottom of our heart!!
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.
As a fellow former resident in your Evia retreats, I congratulate you, Georgia and Nikos, for giving Hilary such an inspiring place to write and look forward to reading her book of poems.
Thank you so much dear Jinny. Hope you are doing great 😉 So lovely to hear from you.