Pip: Libros Libertad this week is doing what it does best — throwing open the doors on work that doesn't fit neatly anywhere, which is basically the highest compliment a literary site can receive.

Mara: vequinox has been busy. The posts span Greek poetry across centuries, and a wide stretch of narrative fiction — excerpts from novels, prose poems, and short lyric work that resist easy categorization.

Pip: Let's start with the poets.

Greek Poets and Their Selected Poems

Mara: The thread running through this group is how Greek poets handle interiority — the gap between what a person knows, feels, or wants, and what they can actually say or do.

Pip: Titos Patrikios puts that tension in a single knot. The poem "A Certain View" opens: "He insisted that only his endless ability to decide made him hesitant and indecisive. Each omission was wrapped in regret and him, in the middle, was raised to the clouds."

Mara: So the upshot is that the capacity for choice becomes its own paralysis — decisiveness and indecision are the same muscle, just flexed differently.

Pip: Antony Fostieris takes a harder angle in "Language of the Dead" — the dead speak in "growling vowels and exiting sobs," panicked, running uphill. It's grief rendered as phonetics.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Atmospheric Poetry" asks how long the air needs to forget a person's scent before landscape reclaims itself. Yannis Ritsos, across two volumes, works the same register — "Winter" gives us reverent old men folding a flag into a pillow, lying back under an "indifferent sky, equally just or unjust over all the sacrifices." "Suspension Points" is quieter, all cut-off gestures and unfinished sentences.

Pip: Tasos Livaditis appears twice. The "Unemployment Days" excerpt from Volume II is long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, which feels right for a poem about forgetfulness arriving as fast as winter. "Calendar Pages," from his Selected Poems, ends with a wish to be buried on a pile of calendars — to take time along.

Mara: Constantine Cavafy also appears twice. "In Sparta" shows a king unable to tell his mother she must go to Egypt as a hostage; she already knows and laughs it off. The second Cavafy post gives us "Kimon, Son of Learchus," a long dramatic monologue about grief, rivalry, and love that refuses to resolve cleanly.

Pip: And the collection called Entropy contributes "Dawn" — a cosmic sweep from river crossings to the Vega of Aldebaran, ending on self-immolation as the only honest description of time passing. Outsized ambition, even by this company.

Mara: From the poems to the prose — the fiction excerpts cover just as much ground.

Narrative Excerpts Across Genres

Mara: The fiction posts this week range from domestic crisis to historical confrontation, and the question they collectively raise is how characters hold themselves together when circumstances have stripped away their usual footing.

Pip: Water in the Wilderness sets that up immediately. Tyne is at a police station, clutching two photographs of her missing husband, and the excerpt lands here: "Until this moment she could almost believe that the past four days were only a dream, that Morley had not disappeared, that he was safe at home looking after the farm. Now, by putting it in the hands of the police, she had to admit to herself and to everyone, that something terrible may have happened to her husband."

Mara: What this means in practice is that the act of asking for help is the moment denial ends — the police station is not a resource, it's a threshold.

Pip: In the Quiet After Slaughter works a completely different register — boyhood, petty theft, Vancouver back alleys — but it lands on the same kind of threshold. Freddy's line, "It's who we are. It's what we do," functions as a whole philosophy crammed into eight words.

Mara: Arrows moves the frame to colonial Venezuela. A friar enters Santiago de León de Caracas to negotiate on behalf of Apacuana's people after Guacaipuro's assassination, and the tension between diplomatic obligation and personal disgust is right on the surface.

Pip: Straits and Turns is a different temperature entirely — a charged encounter at a Madrid sidewalk cafe opposite Atocha station, told with the kind of slow-motion attention that makes the reader very aware of their own pulse.

Mara: Wellspring of Love and Redemption both work the texture of young people navigating authority — a teenager running from a confrontation with her cousin, a newly graduated student being offered a university chair on the spot and needing a day just to breathe.

Pip: Ken Kirkby — Warrior Painter is the outlier here, a biographical excerpt about the painter's battle to get his Arctic work shown. His dealer Alex Fraser finally admits the paintings are excellent — and still refuses to show them. That's a very specific kind of cruelty.

Mara: Jazz with Ella puts a group of travelers through a Soviet airport inspection, every detail calibrated for dread — a guard reading aloud from a student's notes about the Hermitage, a miniature portrait unwrapped like a potential bomb.

Pip: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men lands in a very different past — Irish monks somewhere in the early medieval world, trying to learn a language before they can convert anyone, with Ula pointing out that the children already respond to music.

Mara: Poodie James excerpts a town council scene where a mayor named Torgerson is making the case for clearing out drifters and people from the river shacks — the rhetoric is recognizable, and Engine Fred's quiet reaction says everything.

Pip: The lyric and prose-poem pieces fill in the edges. Wheat Ears gives us "Toothpick," a man keeping a sharp point in his shirt pocket as a way of finding his way home. Red in Black's "National Hypnosis" is exactly what it sounds like. Hours of the Stars has a four-line poem called "Clock" that manages to describe time as drinking from your empty cup. Introspection, Ugga, Impulses, Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy, and The Incidentals round out the range — from a gypsy and his horse approaching a desert well, to a dedication that calls out, without much patience, everyone who bows their head waiting to be saved by a god they cannot name.

Mara: That last one is a useful place to pause — the idea that salvation is already in your hands keeps surfacing across the fiction and the poems both.

Pip: Whether it's Tyne crossing the threshold at the police station, or Kimon admitting his grief has swallowed his resentment, or Livaditis wanting to be buried in calendars — the posts this week keep returning to what people do when the story they were living stops holding.

Mara: More from Libros Libertad next time.