Pip: Libros Libertad, where the backlist is apparently infinite and the poetry never stops — vequinox has been busy.

Mara: Very busy. This episode moves through two distinct territories: a deep stretch of modern Greek poetry, and a wide range of literary fiction and memoir that spans continents, decades, and registers.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry — and there is a lot of it.

Modern Greek Poetry: Costumes, Shadows, and the Unlived Myth

Mara: The question running through these collections is what poetry does with loss — of role, of presence, of the mythic world that once gave things meaning. The Yannis Ritsos volume that anchors this segment puts that tension in theatrical terms.

Pip: And Ritsos lands it in one image. The setup is a theatre company returning to find everything confiscated, and then the poem asks: "with what costumes can they perform, without red curtains and paper forests, without the Lions Gate, when besides the off-by-heart learned words or their own they have recognized that same shadow for the ones who had played with big success the death, and for the others who had played with equal success the immortality?"

Mara: What that means in practice: the actors can't perform death or immortality anymore, because they've seen the real thing. The theatrical frame has collapsed into lived experience.

Pip: The other Ritsos volumes — Volume V and Volume II — press the same nerve differently. Volume V gives you a stairway where people descend and ascend without greeting each other, huge marble wings you still can't fly with. Volume II flips domestic and wild: a woman sits in a swallow's nest, the swallow weaves at the loom.

Mara: Nikos Engonopoulos, in his collection, watches a poplar tree for years hoping to glimpse its dryad, and concludes — quietly — that she probably died long ago, added to "the merciless and so unbearable absences around us." Constantine Cavafy's volume gives us the ritual procession of Sarpedon's body, Sleep and Death delivering it home with professional calm.

Pip: Tasos Livaditis walks on the ceiling because that's where his battle is. Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's speaker chokes on life flowing thickly in her mouth. Kariotakis and Polydouri trade grief like gifts. The anthology Neo-Hellene Poets closes with a boy and a river that was never as harmless as it looked.

Mara: Hours of the Stars, Mythography, Orange, Wheat Ears, and Troglodytes fill out the range — from sulphur-smelling tropic craters to a chickadee on a branch that justifies being alive that morning. The tonal spread is enormous, but the underlying question stays constant.

Pip: From the unlived myth to lives that are very much lived — and sometimes badly.

Literary Fiction and Memoir: Pressure, Place, and the People Who Stay

Pip: The fiction here is doing something specific: it puts characters under pressure — legal, emotional, geographical — and watches what holds and what doesn't. The Qliphoth opens that territory hard.

Mara: The excerpt drops you into a conversation saturated with implication. Larry is explaining how a man called The Rat sold him gear, and Pauline is examining photographs: "I don't mean Tanya's body. I mean the background. Around the chest, behind and between Tanya's elegant legs there's a curious fudged quality to the light, a dark halo, as if the chest itself were an alien splodge, inserted into the picture by some clumsy matte process."

Pip: So the crime scene is also a forgery scene, and no one in the room fully trusts what they're seeing — including the reader.

Mara: Ken Kirkby: A Painter's Quest for Canada runs on a different kind of pressure entirely — the pressure of an artist who refuses to separate art from politics. Ken tells his team he wants Parliament for his massive painting Isumataq, and Karen's verdict is blunt: "He's not going to shut up until you do something about it." He gets Parliament.

Pip: Small Change puts a sharp-minded boy named Salerno in front of a nun who is not amused, and a priest who privately is. The boy's trap — attending the wrong mass and proving it wasn't a sin — is the kind of logical precision that institutions find genuinely threatening.

Mara: Water in the Wilderness and Wellspring of Love both work prairie and rural Canada — the first following a woman named Sadie who tends an unconscious stranger out of something between fear and compassion; the second tracking the quiet domestic tensions of a farming household where Ronald's hurried exit and Rachael's late walk say more than any dialogue does.

Pip: Jazz with Ella takes its characters to Soviet Moscow, where a tour guide named Natasha informs a rattled traveler that "statistically, you were safe" — and means it as comfort.

Mara: In Turbulent Times gives us Ian searching every face in a seaside resort for a woman named Nora, feeling himself excluded from the chain of connected people around him. Prairie Roots is quieter — a memoir of the one-room schoolhouse, five grades, eight subjects, one teacher working the room in forty-five-minute rotations.

Pip: Redemption, Cloe and Alexandra, and Introspection round out the range. Redemption follows Hermes packing for Vancouver, pausing to see his childhood room as if for the first time. Cloe and Alexandra turns a forgotten red umbrella into a bloomed poppy. Introspection moves between political imprisonment and the speaker's insistence on remaining "just and diaphanous."

Mara: Across all of it, the fiction keeps returning to the same pressure point: the moment a person realizes the world they're in will not accommodate them — and what they do next.

Pip: Poetry asks what happens when the costumes are confiscated. Fiction asks what happens when you can't find Nora in the crowd, or you're packing for a country you've never seen.

Mara: Same question, different forms. Next time, we'll see what else is waiting on the shelf.