Strisik, Catherine. 2025. Goat, Goddess, Moon. Holy Cow! Press.
It begins in Amygdaliés, her great grandmother’s village in north-central Greece. Here, the opening poem discloses, is the love/poem with the seed,/the source of what was/buried and what was dug/what is nutrient. Amygdaliés is aptly named with the Greek word for “almond,” which also designates the almond-shaped biological structure in the human brain that connects emotion to memory. Just so, poems redolent of memory and emotion chronicle a search for home, family, and identity in Catherine Strisik’s new poetry collection, Goat, Goddess, Moon.
The collection is a love story, or perhaps a love song, since its first poem, “Seed,” declares: This is not a story,/more the truth. Strisik’s poems plumb the depths of this truth with what I think of as her trademark techniques: provocative line breaks, fluid syntax with minimal punctuation, and colorful language that finds the aesthetic overlap between vivid particulars and emotive abstractions. Goat, Goddess, Moon explores the truth of her search, through dirt, tears and blood, encompassing the full scope of experience in both its beauty and its strangeness.
Strisik organizes Goat, Goddess, Moon into three sections: My Villages, My Labyrinth, and My Name. The first two sections establish a sense of place. Section one immerses the reader in the locations of her grandparents’ homes, Amygdaliés and Trapezítsa in north-central Greece. Section two centers on Heraklion on the island of Crete, the location of the mythical minotaur in the labyrinth. The poems probe local foods, customs, and family connections, interlaced with contemporary experiences. The book’s final section offers the fullest and most sensual expression of the poet’s search for renewed identity in the repeated utterance of her own name, Katerína.
Strisik’s new collection advances her already richly developed poetic skill. Her first poetry collection, Thousand Cricket Song (2010, 2016, Plain View), confronts the aftermath of unspeakable horror in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, yet finds exquisite beauty there. About the skulls of “Tuol Sleng Prison,” she writes, “When I press/my ear to their jaws, crab//shells and dried rice drop out./Then their smells rise to me:/lemongrass, coriander,//mint leaves.” In The Mistress (2016, Three: A Taos Press), Strisik characterizes a spouse’s debilitating disease as a marriage interloper. As the disease steals the beloved in macabre ways, Strisik’s poems hold on to hope. Her heartbreaking poem, “Hotel Belvedere, and the Wife Whispers” affirms, “the November moon//one night away from full/choking me/the moon far from ordinary radiating its sureness.//Even so, I am capable of music.” From that sublime scope, Strisik turns in her next book to the weight of insects (Insectum Gravitis, 2019, Main Street Rag), demonstrating her fascination with the small, the ordinary, and the neglected dimensions of experience: Prominent beak, an orange//cloak, the pillowed//rhododendron quiet/wait, you//bite me yes bite me (“Kissing Bug Declares”).
Equipped with such effective tools, Goat, Goddess, Moon amplifies the dimensions of a primary metaphor for Strisik, lovemaking. Her poems reflect experience in sensual terms of touch, desire, and interpenetration. Describing a first encounter with goat stew, for example, “27 Romanou” confesses, I wanted to be stroked/moist with the Cretan Sea. “Pulp” observes that a feral cat fails to sense My need to sway I mean//swoon. My nipples, or the peculiar/mouth/for love’s sake/is so often in command like the alphabet/in any language. Noting the kitchen furniture, “Aikaterína” describes a … walnut table/I confess I’ve never made love/on though it is as wide and long/as a full-size bed…. Her title poem, “Goat, Goddess, Moon,” recounts, So aroused I’d become by the goat-tending/myth I could see the grainy grasses on her/tongue at the food bin…. I was kissed/by a goat last night on my right hand the wire/fence sharp/the three-quarter/moon a bright lantern. “Agora” declares and repeats, I love what I love.
As in her previous collections, Strisik’s poetic vision here encompasses the full scope of experience, including its seamy aspects, such as “Upon Seeing a Used Condom on the Ground.” “Labyrinth” describes being bitten by a dog and “Centuries Old Kako Mati” tells the story of an old gypsy in the Thessaloniki Bus Terminal who gives the speaker the evil eye. “Taverna Zaxaris at Paleokastro Beach” details an encounter with a cat who is missing an eye. Even in that distressing scene, the poem finds compassion: I want to know who/prays, who weeps, who shovels//the sediment when his body/is no fur, is no bone. When his voice//is silent.
Several poems (“In My Grandfather’s Living Room,” “Kaliméra, Kaliméra,” “kalispera,” Goat, Goddess Moon,” “Ceremony, A Kind of Greek Woman”) register a point of pride in Greece, the sounds of the Greek language. Noting the similar sound of Greek “good morning” to the poet’s name, “Kaliméra, Kaliméra” prefigures the sustained exploration of sound and meaning in the book’s final section where the poet’s journey culminates. “White Orchid” remembers, In certain southwestern light I am all the faces of my past. But in Crete’s “Humid Weather,” no one sees me as real, and I see no one else as real, either. There, I am/raw to the primal.
The long sequence “Aikatérina” tumbles out a cascade of sensual detail that reverberates with the sound of the poet’s name. It states, sometimes the sound of my name in Greek is the Christmas cactus in my dining room that blooms three times a year, so the sequence utters the name over and over, in Greek, in English, in Greek letters and with the letters of the English alphabet. Its sound, the poem announces, is love. The collection ends with renewal, but renewal bloodied and weighted with memory. “Bone Cavity” asks, … who can bear it—can you bear it can you/bare it—the familial blue//extravagant shudder? It is spring. And finally, in “Me of Me:” My face carries my weight/like a prayer nailed half-mast to a flagpole.
Goat, Goddess, Moon teems with sensuality. Aromas, textures, tastes, sights, and sounds swell the achievement of identity in a place both foreign and familiar. A mature expression of a developed sense of self, Catherine Strisik’s collection will inspire and delight.
Margaret Lee
August 23, 2025
