Format: Chapbook
Size: 5 ½ x 8 ½
Pages: 36
inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel
Giorgia Pavlidou
Giorgia Pavlidou is an American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. Before devoting herself full-time to painting and writing, she worked as a clinical psychotherapist for about ten years. She received her MA in Urdu literature from Lucknow University, India and her MFA in Fiction from MMU Manchester, UK, (though her meetings with LA poet-philosopher Will Alexander are exceedingly more impactful). Her work has recently appeared in such places as Caesura, Lotus-Eater, Zoetic Press, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Entropy and Thrice Fiction. She’s the main English language editor of SULΦUR literary magazine. Additionally, Ireland-based Strukturiss Magazine selected her as the main visual artist of their January 2022 issue 3.1.
This is intense work. It’s incandescent. It’ll catch your eyes on fire. Burn your brain down. Giorgia Pavlidou has managed to make anguish appear beautiful. And sexy. Artaud is the tutelary spirit of this work. The anguish is real and the words have the taste and smell of the netherworld in its black gown of sibilant pupa. This is language with a biology; it writhes, hisses, and propagates by glossolalic impregnation. Reading these poems is an immersive experience. Here we find madness, anguish, erotica and Rabelaisian humor welded and wed to a language full of “lexical tentacles” and “fire dressed in fire.” It gets under your skin, this speech. These strangely intelligent & autonomous words, manic as wasps in a vessel of glass.
—John Olson
A pyrotechnics of lingual essence, Giorgia Pavlidou's “inside the black hornet's mind-tunnel” yields feeling through the language of the heart creating darkened constellations that rivet the inner eye all the while whirling as an estranged yet organic imaginal terrain.
—Will Alexander
saudade for antonin
reading artaud’s poems
i tasted the kind of love
one might experience for the last time
for something
one knows for sure
you’ve never held dear
& the words
helped me peel a silence from myself
out of an oval form
nested inside my imagination
a form shaped like a coffin
or a yearning
for the sole thing
that won’t ever happen
yet has happened
so many times before
in the distant future