Oscar Wilde was subjected to it, right there, and he came out a broken man. This year, while working on section L of the new book, in which, among other things, an inmate dreams of a penal treadmill, I found out that Wandsworth was one of the places in which the so-called everlasting staircase was used to protect inmates from idleness and make them more productive. I am thinking now that it is perhaps the same kind of light setting the scene for the opening passages of the trilogy. Shorsha and I got there with the first, almost imperceptible, grey morning glow the room was still half-dark when we started the reading.

Although my recollection is rather hazy, I can tell you that the feeling of stepping in “an alien yet neighboring” world-as the title of our LARB interview goes-struck me deeply. My first experience of a prison reading, however, happened long ago, in 2002, at Wandsworth Prison in London. Did they? If so, how?ĭimitris Lyacos : You are right, those circumstances fed into one another like a positive-feedback loop. Toti O’Brien: I believe the theme of captivity was already one of your focuses, but I wonder if the circumstances I mentioned (reading poetry in prisons in 2019, visiting Skid Row, the pandemic) might have influenced its development throughout the new book. They are, in fact, one of its leitmotifs. But echoes of captivity also permeate Poena Damni. Because Poena Damni begins with an evasion, a flight, and the new book was announced as the “zeroeth” volume of the trilogy, it seems natural for it to delve into the captivity that precedes the fugue. Some of them were variously connected to themes of reclusion, as perhaps I should have expected. Lyacos’s new book, Until the Victim Becomes Our Own, is currently being translated into English, and I had the privilege of reading several excerpts. Less than a year later, Covid brought themes of virtual confinement to the forefront of our collective concern. In the interview, we discussed his experience at the prisons as well as the impressions he gathered of Skid Row, which to him evoked a wall-less, plein-air, virtual form of incarceration. He had also visited for the first time Los Angeles’s “Skid Row,” which reviewers of his work had compared, on occasion, to the setting of his second book, With the People from the Bridge. When we met, he had just read for the inmates of a few Arizona prisons. In 2019 I interviewed Dimitris Lyacos on the occasion of the US tour/launch of his trilogy, Poena Damni, which had been recently released in the English complete edition. Dimitris Lyacos with Marsias / Photo by Walter Melcher

The First Death by Dimitris Lyacos