''I remember caresses, kisses, touching
each other''s hair. We had no sense that
anything else existed''
- Elena Penga, ''Heads''
''Nothing, not even the drowning of a child
Stops the perpetual motion of the world''
- Stamatis Polenakis, ''Elegy''
Since the crisis hit in 2008, Greece has played host to a cultural renaissance unlike anything seen in the country for over thirty years. Poems of startling depth and originality are being written by native Greeks, -gr-and migrants alike. They grapple with the personal and the political; with the small revelations of gardening and the viciousness of streetfights; with bodies, love, myth, migration and economic crisis.
In Austerity Measures, the very best of the writing to emerge from that creative ferment - much of it never before translated into English - is gathered for the first time. The result is a map to the complex territory of a still-evolving scene - and a unique window onto the li
