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The Grid

Eli Payne Mandel

Cover of The Grid by Eli Payne Mandel
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, American, First Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (96 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2023)
9781800173293
£12.99 £11.69
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jul 2023)
9781800173309
£10.39 £9.35
To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2024
    Shortlisted for the John Pollard Poetry Prize 2024
    A The Telegraph Book of the Year
    The Telegraph
    Poetry Book of the Month August 2023


    The Grid
    is about the end of worlds, ancient and modern. In three sequences of poems interspersed with Mandel's own translations from classical texts, figures of obsession and loneliness try to decrypt what Maurice Blanchot called 'the writing of the disaster'. Like a detective novel, the title sequence pieces together archival fragments into a lyric essay about Alice Kober, the half-forgotten scholar behind the decipherment of the ancient writing system called Linear B. Across different wartimes, Mandel adapts the typography and formatting of archived papers, their overlaps and errors and aporias, which compel readers to invest creatively in the very act of reading, learning new ways into language as they go.

    The leaps between past and present work in dialogue like a series of exhilarating stepping stones. This is a collection of what, though sometimes written as prose, turn out to be poems. From Ovid's bitter letters of exile to the prime minister's letters of instruction to nuclear submarine captains, The Grid tells a series of stories about four thousand years of apocalypse. Strange, humane, and deeply rooted in the ancient world, Mandel's first book surveys the ruins of the West with no nostalgia.
    Eli Payne Mandel is a poet and psychoanalyst in training. He studied English literature at Yale and Princeton, and has lived most of his life in in Brooklyn, New York. His poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PN Review, New Poetries IX, Raritan, The Harvard ... read more
    Awards won by Eli Payne Mandel Short-listed, 2024 The John Pollard Poetry Prize
    (The Grid)
    Short-listed, 2024 The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award
    (The Grid)
    'Erudite, elliptical and intriguing in equal measure... these poems are veined with Mandel's exquisite yet disquieting images'
    Josephine Balmer, Long Poem Magazine
    'American writer Eli Payne Mandel's first collection, The Grid, has opened on to a wonderland of poetry and prose. It is headed by a lyric essay about Alice Kober, the long unrecognised classicist who worked on the decipherment of Linear B. This is poetry as archaeology, a beautiful rebuilding, through fragments, of still-living pasts.'
    Carol Rumens, The Guardian
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