For decades, data has told the story of our ecological crisis. Scientists track carbon emissions, map deforestation and log biodiversity loss. Yet data alone cannot make humanity feel the reality of a changing planet. True impact hinges on a shift in language – a vocabulary that dissolves the border between the human and the living world.
Phoebe Giannisi embodies this shift. Poet, classicist, performer, architect and environmentalist, Giannisi has produced one of the most radical bodies of eco-poetry in contemporary literature. Her work blends ancient Greek myth, site-specific performance, video poems and field recordings to offer a long-lasting lesson in what it means to coexist on a vulnerable earth.
Giannisi’s environmental message is anchored in the chimera. In classical mythology, the chimera was a fire-breathing monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent. For Giannisi, this creature is not a monstrous abstraction but a biological and ethical reality.
Giannisi performing in the natural landscape on mainland Greece (2013). Tassos Vrettos
In her collection Chimera (2024), Giannisi bridges ancient myth with modern genetics, drawing a line from Homer’s legendary she-goat chimera to the scientific phenomenon of microchimerism – the way cells from one organism can live permanently inside another. Humans are, her poetry suggests, inherently collaborative creatures. As she writes in the poem Chimera II:
Call me Chimera.
A being composed of
other beings
A being with different genetic codes
incorporated.
Various genes connected
in one body.
Multiple body.
Giannisi’s poetry challenges the delusion that humans stand apart from nature, either as masters or saviours. Instead, she invites her readers to recognise that we are composite creatures, physically and ecologically tangled with the world around us. To harm the landscape is to tear apart our own multi-species body.
This philosophy comes to life through Giannisi’s use of multiple voices. Her poems, now collected in Goatsong (2025), abandon the solitary narrator to thrive as living ecosystems where human and non-human voices hold equal weight. In her second poetry collection, Cicada (2022), the protagonist is the eponymous insect. Giannisi layers ancient texts by Plato, Archilochus and the Japanese poet Bashō, alongside observations of the insect’s life cycle and its droning mating calls. Its song becomes environmental testimony – a non-human language demanding the reader’s attention.
Giannisi’s focus deepened in Chimera, her third collection. In it, she tracks the ancient traditions of northern Greece’s Vlach herding communities, who move their livestock seasonally between mountain and valley pastures.
Rather than romanticising pastoral life, Giannisi constructs an archive of shared survival, reassembling state archives, regional oral histories and her own field recordings. In her live performances, Giannisi loops the cries of shepherds alongside the bellowing of the herd, the roar of a passing motorcycle and the grinding crunch of a cement mixer.
This acoustic space forces listeners to inhabit the modern industrial world and the ancient, animal landscape simultaneously. It is an ecology of sound that captures both the beauty of shared life and the vulnerability of an environment under threat.
Language as a material path
Trained as an architect, Giannisi conceives of language as a physical path to be walked, tasted and felt. When I hosted Giannisi at the Center of Hellenic Studies, Harvard in October 2023, I watched this spatial approach to poetry take shape in the room. There is an intimate, architectural precision to how she moves language off the page and into a shared physical space.
Giannisi holding her aigis during performance in 2016. Beowulf Sheehan/Onassis Antigone Festival New York
For her 2017 installation Aigis II at the Panourgias Museum in Amfissa, Greece, Giannisi inscribed her poetry onto semitransparent goatskin parchment. On one side, she traced traditional migration routes and on the other, she wrote lines of verse. As I observed viewers handling the parchment, the written word and the geography of the earth ghost one another through the animal hide.
In this method of composition, the human body becomes the primary medium for environmental memory. In her performances, Giannisi routinely blocks her own sight with a cloth or basket, intentionally de-centering her own human gaze to open up a vulnerable, sensory relationship with her surroundings. Her poems are filled with the taste of an earthy cicada, the sting of sea salt and the pungent smell of animal secretions.
This late autumn, that physical performance of environmental memory is coming to the University of Bristol. I will join Giannisi and her poet-translator, Brian Sneeden, to see how these ancient textures resonate inside a new architectural space, letting our contemporary landscape and classical myth collide once again.
Grounding her poetry in these realities allows Giannisi to create a space where human and environmental forces spill into one another. This strategy carries a subtle political edge, positioning her work as a defence of the “commons”, the shared resources currently being dismantled by economic profit. Her collaborative projects, including acoustic explorations of marine soundscapes, bear witness to the devastating loss of biodiversity driven by climate change and industrial expansion.
Giannisi covering her head during a 2012 performance. Yorgos Rimenidis
In the boundary crossing tradition of poet and translator Barbara Köhler and the 2026 Nobel prize winner Anne Carson, Giannisi dissolves the divisions between myth, scholarship and creativity, turning them into vital tools for navigating our difficult era.
Surviving the ecological crisis requires an entirely new framework of imagination. We are called to view our world not as resources to exploit, but as a vast, connected web where every creature’s song breathes life into the whole.
