Catherine Strisik. Goat, Goddess, Moon. Holy Cow! Press. 2025. Pp. 77. Paper $18.
by Adrianne Kalfopoulou
Goat, Goddess, Moon, Catherine Strisik’s third collection of poetry, takes us on a journey through the Amygdaliés and Trapezitsa villages of northern Greece, and the multiple labyrinths, emotional and literal, that map this collection’s Greek American heart. A wild lyricism distinguishes these poems where quotidian moments such as a good morning greeting “Kaliméra” or the flavor of “Cretan Olive Oil,” “aromatiko,” amplify the vagaries and ruptures of Strisik’s memories of parents, grandparents and great parents as well as of places imagined and lived.
Separated into three sections, prefaced by “My” “My Villages…,” “My Labyrinth…,” “My Name:…,” these poems, beginning with “Seed,” a homage to the poet’s great grandmother in Amygdalies, travel in rhapsodic momentum to achieve the collection’s final section, a celebration of the poet’s name, “Katerina”; also, in Greek, “Aikaterina.” The journeys toward this cumulative grouping of poems, engages the inheritances of a 3rd generation Greek American child in poems like “Seed” and “Genealogy” whose portal into the Greek world of grandparents is often, and archetypically, through language passed on anecdotally. The ways particular foods, places, and people are named renders an intimacy to Strisik’s poems adding to the rich body of Greek American writings focused on acts of reclamation that reinvigorate the ways “Greekness” is experienced in the diaspora. We have, for example in “vein,” parenthetical lacunae that illustrate the literal spaces and unknowns of a grandfather’s migrant journey “from his hometown in 1913” during the second Balkan War; that in his pocket “cut from his mother’s hem” he carried “paximathia” (rusks), becomes the poet’s reimagined narrative, a vein into how “during the fragmentation of a culture” he would “arrive at 17 to the rest of his life.”
The collection’s middle section of poems, in “My Labyrinth: Heraklion,” moves through various emotional labyrinths of adult speakers, none ever too far from the complexities of the body itself, always female, always something of a “delicate revolution” that conflates mythologies of old with the griefs and discoveries in the poet’s present. There is the poem “Agora” that opens with “I love what I love” where “The man at the fish market” shows the speaker “guts torn out with his fingers right in front of me.” Who flirts with her, who “pointed to my olive blouse with lilac flowers, low-//draped front,” and says, “maybe pull it up a little.” There’s the woman in the same poem who gives the speaker “the price in Greek.” And notes, “you look like one of us”; in “Goddess to Goddess” the poem’s epigram reads “-upon seeing a girl dancing on the edge of Fortetsa” and wide-margined line breaks make for an iteration of a dance:
Are you the opa and am I the dance? Touching bare- footed wild-weeded fennel or agape
The physicality of the dance somehow recreated in the movement of the lines and their breaks suggests, too, a literal movement, and proximity to what the speaker seems to be asking in the question about love, agape, as what she encounters both resonates with myth, or mythic allusions, but is finally very much of the present moment: “mythed/unmythed.”
Many of the poems in this section engage with Knossos, but again within the quotidian moment, as “fenced geese, ducks, and chickens waddled,” where “a startled dog, an unkempt offspring, offspring of pre-history fanged/and fury,” alludes to the three-headed Cerberus guarding the underworld. In this case it is a stray dog in “cobblestoned alleyways,” who “though my/pantleg/… split me”; the subsequent, and final line of that first section of the poem, “and I must make peace with this,” ushers in the various labyrinths the speaker will now move through, lost but never far from the sensory moment that leads to further, more layered strata of history:
Springtime
And me.
Difficult to carry
the burden of fallen cultures, and be the deliverer
of shear madness.
At me.
While I’m out simply for an evening walk.
Strisik provides multivalent referents of a personal cosmology that becomes, too, a way to root and expand her fluidities of belonging:
…. echo
echo echo Greek name Katerina
my Greek name is Never on Sunday,
my Greek name is Sultana,
Hariklea, my Greek name is
walnut tree, gardener, my Greek
name is crochet, Zorba, my Greek
name is please bittersweet me;
but sometimes the unexpected
occurs and the Greek
Katerina
hides in a vessel in Knossos
“Aikaterina,” the key poem in the collection’s third section, spans nine pages and twenty sections, some no more than a line, as in the single line that is the poet’s name in Greek; it is a fugue, contrapuntal and polyphonic voicings of an I that gives us various entry points into what has made up this layering of identity that so often returns to “Katerina,” the Greek demotic or vernacular of the more formal “Aikaterina” the section’s cumulating title poem with its many iterations of Greek lineage. But the collection’s ambitions do not limit themselves to the connections of family, a more visceral, pagan archeology is at work as the collection’s title attests. Strisik’s various personas will often excavate how the quotidian moment will connect us to the sensorial, near-sacred land with its embedded history.
“For Sacred Purposes: The Boy, the Herd, The Gold” tells us:
…the land is layered
with foundations from before and before
and before. On the mountain the boy
holds a god in his hands.
See the mountain rise in his face
and there raised in glorification, the goat
offered in sacrifice.
And in the collection’s title poem “Goat, Goddess, Moon” we are in the mythmaking act itself, as constructed by the speaker’s proximity to both language and place:
So aroused I’d become by the goat-tending
myth I could see the grainy grasses on her
tongue at the food bin, and heard
the suckling nymph Aretusa
as she said pomegranate
and prickly pear.Greek women form
the most beautiful
mouths when speaking, and she pronounced
Knossos like this
K-NO-SSOS
The lessons of “Genealogy” come as much from how smell, touch, and taste will lead us to naming our ties to kin as they are about finding the language that presences and locates them. It is “the scent of basil/and dill” that inspires “those verdant herbs from his pen,” as the poet recollects her grandfather’s instruction to “Write, Katerina, about the basil”; the many transliterated Greek words scattered and embedded in the poems and the poems’ titles enact a map: they lead us to understandings of how the poems’ speakers, so often the poet herself from childhood through to middle-age, comes upon the history of the culture and its ancestors: There is “psomi” in a Greek bakery where the speaker, a child, stands “eye level/to the scented breads, inhale inhale//inhale our three thousand years’ rising.//” There’s the Greek “Magiritsa” soup of entrails and organs of lamb and goat where “released lips//hollowed where the consecrated confused/or faith, maybe//the butchered, scented with frankincense, and/myrrh” becomes “the livid/communion//on breath, the wine itself.” There’s “Koukla,” Greek for “doll,” as rendered in another example of how the vernacular becomes a pathway into the poet’s personal experiencing of “a fresh pear/sweet, innocent with wanderings, /chin cleft from, a great great archeological find.”
Strisik weaves the many braids of experience, ancestry, and language around the centrality of the body, whether animal or human, or animal and human. A dog rips into her leg in an alleyway, the pain and scar live beyond the incident for years later. The cats, dogs, goats, and other animals are intimately connected to the human, and the female body in particular: “I walked the labyrinth//for hours. I felt faint the humidity and my erratic woman’s cycles/in proximity to the goat//parts in my bowl with cracked wheat that had soaked and dry-roasted in the sun.
We too are nurtured by the generosity of these encounters, as Strisik journeys us in her many songs of how the gods, goddesses, goats, and moon will take us through the labyrinths of ancestral connections, imagined, passed down, and always personal.
October 19, 2025
Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of three poetry collections, most recently A History of Too Much, and three collections of prose. The re in refuge, essays is her most recent publication. She lives in Athens, Greece.