Praise for THE GRID

The best poetry books of 2023, The Telegraph

Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, 2024

Shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic Runciman Prize, 2024

Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize, 2025

 *

“The Grid is a thriller with a scholar at the center – a story of Western Culture’s rise and demise begun in vivid curiosity and finished in painful precision. Told in prose and lyric fragments, the collection takes the shape of a series of hints and guesses, restraining and revealing the dark matter of patriarchy and power that classical literature carries with its versions, mistakes, and translations. 

The first section follows the classicist Alice Kober, whose now-invisible discovery of the pattern behind the Greek we’ve learned to translate haunts the scholarly record with an unexpected sensuousness: ‘Her vast grids are a science of graphics, a way of writing-knowing that trawls blank waters streaked with stars.’ In this story, and the poems and ‘letters’ that follow, Mandel reminds us, again and again, of the erotic quality of knowing, one that eschews worldly result in favor of a kind of pure energy, a life force more alive than productive, and more ferocious than useful: ‘So my heart is eaten without end.’ 

The Grid is no mere footnote to the classics – in this work, Mandel changes the shape of the American narrative poem forever.”

—Katie Peterson, author of Fog and Smoke

*

 “Grids hover. Non-directional. A buzz of light, not sound. Disembodied.

 Painters muse over the synchrony of grids. Their resistance to time.

 As if by miracle The Grid manages to conjure a body for the grid in the name of Alice Kober, professor of Latin and mistress of classical languages, many long dead. The linearity of Linear B, a script deprived of sound, preserved in the fiery destruction of the Palace of Knossos, defies the synchrony of the grid.

 In The Grid, Eli Payne Mandel emerges from the holocaust of these languages with the tablet

of Linear B in his hands.”

 —Rosalind E. Krauss, author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths 

*

“The rich mixture reads like Sciascia crossed with Sebald, expressed in a poetic prose and free-ish verse that shuttles between John Ashbery and Anne Carson.”

 —The Drift

 *

 “A book about reading the unreadable, and seeking meaning where it can’t be found, The Grid resists neat conclusions and hyperbole in a way that feels true to its subject.… The deadpan, dreamlike prose-poems—surreal-ish if not surrealist—reminded me of Ian Seed, and of Kafka’s short fables.”

 —The Telegraph

 *

 “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.”

 —The Guardian

 *

 “Mandel’s book quests after the ancient world with a disarming spirit of curiosity, charming the dead while asking them to come out and play.”

 —The Poetry Foundation