The Grid

The Grid is a collection of poems by Mandel that explore the end of worlds, ancient and modern, and the figures of obsession and loneliness that try to decrypt it. It is shortlisted for the John Pollard Poetry Prize 2024, longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2024, and The Telegraph Book of the Year. The title sequence pieces together archival fragments into a lyric essay about Alice Kober, the scholar behind the decipherment of Linear B. The leaps between past and present work in dialogue, and the book tells a series of stories about four thousand years of apocalypse.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 96 pages
Publication date: 27 July 2023
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd

Longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2024. Shortlisted for the John Pollard Poetry Prize 2024. A The Telegraph Book of the Year. The Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month August 2023. The Grid is about the end of worlds, ancient and modern. In three sequences of poems interspersed with Mandel's own translations from classical texts, figures of obsession and loneliness try to decrypt what Maurice Blanchot called "the writing of the disaster." Like a detective novel, the title sequence pieces together archival fragments into a lyric essay about Alice Kober, the half-forgotten scholar behind the decipherment of the ancient writing system called Linear B. Across different wartimes, Mandel adapts the typography and formatting of archived papers, their overlaps and errors, and aporias, which compel readers to invest creatively in the very act of reading, learning new ways into language as they go. The leaps between past and present work in dialogue like a series of exhilarating stepping stones. This is a collection of what, though sometimes written as prose, turn out to be poems. From Ovid's bitter letters of exile to the prime minister's letters of instruction to nuclear submarine captains, The Grid tells a series of stories about four thousand years of apocalypse. Strange, humane, and deeply rooted in the ancient world, Mandel's first book surveys the ruins of the West with no nostalgia.

Weight: 134g
Dimension: 133 x 216 x 10 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800173293