George Kalamaras, To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me. Dos Madres Press. 2023. Pp. 318. Paper $30.00.

George Kalamaras’s poems do not so much announce themselves as they breathe and murmur. They arrive less as statements than as bodily sensation; they are felt before they are understood. To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly is full of this kind of encounter, where meaning seems to begin in the mouth. In a poem dedicated to his parents, Kalamaras asks a question that feels more bodily than rhetorical: “How can we ever truly / tell tone textures of the tongue, torn as we are from sound?” (77). The line lingers on its own consonants—t sounds stacking into “tone,” “textures,” “tongue,” “torn”—as if the mouth were trying to rebuild what distance has undone. What’s at stake is not only sense, but the grain of voice itself: the texture that makes a voice recognizable even after it is gone. This is why the collection insists on listening. Mouths open everywhere. Tongues press forward. Vowels linger, sometimes uncomfortably, refusing to settle into a “message” too quickly. Personal and public histories are not narrated so much as held—sometimes gently, sometimes with strain—in the chest.

This is a book devoted to Greek poetry, Greek ancestors, Greek sounds. It moves through portraits of poets, saints, mythic figures, family members, and the poet himself. In this movement, Kalamaras assembles a capacious lyric archive that stretches from antiquity to the present. Yet what unifies these poems is not chronology or argument but an insistence on intimacy. Kalamaras, who is a second generation Greek American, approaches Greece not as a territory or even as a national tradition, but as something sustained in the body. Language sticks in the throat, rhythm is passed from mouth to mouth, and sounds echo. In the same poem, “How Our Bones Refuse to Close,” Kalamaras writes the body as an archive of names: “This is how I speak. How I grow my bones. / Grateful for the fluids of your flesh that made my flesh… Your names still pass through / me. The sound of your voice” (77). The repeated how matters here: language is not something he possesses but something he is formed by, almost osmotically, through “fluids” and “flesh.” Even after his parents become “burnt bone-blur,” their names continue to move through him. Moments like this indicate the way in which Greece is apprehended, for him, aurally rather than geographically. Here is great-grandfather. Here is grandmother. Here is Nono and here, too, is Mama. Lineage is not traced in these poems; it is inhaled. The past enters not as memory alone but as something still warm, still breathing.

In this sense, Kalamaras recasts the role of poet-as-historian as one grounded in proximity rather than authority. History, in this book, does not arrive as event or documentation. It does not announce itself through dates, battles, or official turning points. Instead, it appears through sensation. In other words, through the body’s ways of knowing. The poet becomes a kind of medium who allows voices from different moments to pass through him. In one stanza, Kalamaras asks: “Which history did you die in? / From which history were you eaten? Time is often confused” (63). Questions such as this one turn the lyric into a method of contact rather than a record. For him, Greek poets and close family members appear not as distant figures to be memorialized but as presences who are addressed and sometimes physically tended to.

One of the most striking features of To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly is its obsession with the mouth. For Kalamaras, mouths speak, swallow, kiss, moan. They hold stones. They hold vowels. Language is never abstract here. He returns again and again to the idea that speech happens in the body before it happens on the page—that sound precedes interpretation, and that voice emerges before meaning stabilizes. He makes this explicit when he writes of Elytis, Seferis, and Ritsos as “three corners of a building—the reader, / the fourth,” insisting that this intimacy is not only permitted but necessary: “This is not sacrilege. It is never / sacrilege to consume the body and blood / of the poem. We bend. We kneel. We beg / of it in our mouths” (191). The religious register here is doing real work. “Consume” turns reading into ingestion; “body and blood” makes poetry a sacrament; and the repeated we folds the reader into a communal act of reverence. But the poem is not a stable altar. Rather, it enters “the uncertainty / of my mid-twenties,” linking lyric devotion to a moment of personal unsteadiness.

Greekness, in this sense, is not a stable identity or inherited label but a sustained physical act: keeping a sound alive long enough for it to matter. What’s striking is that this intimacy with Greek sound is conveyed largely in English, as if translation itself were part of the inheritance. Vowels, especially, take on an almost talismanic role. They are treated less as units of language than as living things—things that can be lodged in the chest, elongated, passed on, even protected. The poems suggest that to be Greek is not necessarily to master grammar or history, but to remain in relation to a sound that insists upon itself. This attention to vocality gives the book much of its lyric force. It also aligns Kalamaras with a long tradition of poets for whom language is first and foremost embodied. Seferis, Dimoula, Ritsos, and others are animated here not simply as influences but as voices still in circulation. Eleni Vakalo, most notably, is said to have been “born / with a vowel in her mouth,” a line that crystallizes the book’s belief that voice comes before explanation (94). And because this belief is voiced in English, the line also suggests that “Greek sound” can survive outside Greek itself—carried not only through language, but through the mouth’s insistence on sound, even in translation.

There is also something quietly erotic about these encounters. Poets, saints, and ancestors are touched, kissed, anointed with oil. Desire moves backward through time and attaches itself to voices and bodies that are long gone. This eroticism is not presented as scandal or sexual confession; it feels devotional, almost liturgical. Eros becomes a mode of attention, or a way of staying close to the dead without claiming ownership over them. At its best, this intimacy is deeply moving. It resists abstraction and insists that poets, historical figures, and ancestors are not merely names in a lineage but bodies that once breathed. At the same time, the erotic tenderness that suffuses the book often smooths history’s rougher edges. Suffering is acknowledged, but it is quickly metabolized into lyric continuity.

Reading this book as someone who grew up in Greece during the economic crisis, I felt both drawn in and held at a distance. The poems are generous, deeply learned, and often beautiful, but they are shaped by a particular orientation toward Greece—one that privileges continuity over rupture, lyric inheritance over political, economic, and material exhaustion. The Greece that emerges here is rich myth. The connecting thread is continuity: the idea that culture survives by being carried forward through storytelling and devotion. What is largely absent is the bureaucratic fatigue, the quiet anger, the slow violence of austerity that shaped daily life for many of us. The Greece of these poems does not stand in line. It does not fill out forms. It does not wait.

One of the book’s most striking portraits is Kalamaras’s poem for C. P. Cavafy, where poetic voice and erotic longing are inseparable: “In Athens. Cavafy’s craving. / Sung backward as a smalling / toward song. Quite deaf. Quite / breath… And splayed his most private tongue, / split with spit, slung with dove-blood” (155). The diction is intimate and physical and refuses to keep lyric tradition at a respectful distance. Cavafy’s “private tongue” names both the erotic body and the poetic one, because for him the same organ is responsible for desire and for art. In passages like this, Greece becomes less a place than a charged field of voices. While that inheritance is powerful, it can also feel idealistic. This Greece is not untrue, but it is selective. Here, the Greece that emerges most vividly is made of poets and longing, not paperwork and austerity. Thus, for readers shaped by those pressures, the devotion can seem rather estranging.

However, the collection is not naïve about suffering. It is full of illness, exile, madness, political repression, and death. What distinguishes it is how quickly these experiences are folded into a larger, almost cosmic sense of continuity. History hurts, but it does not seem to break. There is little sense of rupture so severe that lyric inheritance might fail. In a poem reminiscing on his (namesake) grandfather’s marriage, Kalamaras merges continuity with physical companionship: “They will love and touch and love / as if they were continually touching / spring. As if the lilacs, unseen behind them, / would temper years and inhabit any possible / pain” (117). This is continuity as fantasy and as comfort: the hope that tenderness can “temper years,” that touch can alter the texture of history.

Kalamaras’s rich archive allows him to recover voices excluded from official narratives, but it also filters history through affect, through what can be borne by the body. When history is translated too quickly into sensation, it can lose its ability to interrupt or to refuse smooth inheritance. What the book offers, above all, is a model of care. Care for language. Care for the dead. Care for the act of transmission itself. The poems insist that inheritance is not automatic; it requires attention and repetition. Kalamaras frames inheritance not as a static legacy but as a recurring event: “Another is to die and be / reborn yet again—a century later, perhaps— / through the mouths of your descendants. / Into the glorious grief and restoration of bloodlines / beckoning the tongue back and forth across the page. / What we think might be the uncut possibility / of a poem, or at least a woeful wobbling of words” (187). In this instance, the poem imagines lineage as a muscular contraction. The body does not merely remember; it performs remembrance. At the same time, care can become a way of avoiding confrontation. The book rarely dwells in anger. When politics appear, they are filtered through myth and lyric voice. For readers attuned to the abrasiveness of recent Greek history—the ways institutions fail, the ways language itself becomes thin under pressure—this gentleness may not always be enough.

The recurrent image of the horse’s belly—dark, enclosed, sheltering—captures the book’s ambivalence better than any claim could. To sleep there is to be protected but also hidden away. It is to survive by remaining inside something ancient, something larger than oneself, something that moves forward regardless. Ancient here does not mean untouched by history, it means rooted in beginnings; in one’s first syllables of belonging. The poems rest there; breathing and sustained by sound. Whether that shelter preserves or obscures what presses from outside is not a question the book resolves. It is one it continues to interrogate.

Chloe Tsolakoglou

February 07, 2026

Chloe Tsolakoglou is a translator, poet, and scholar based in New York City. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.