The Grid

Eli Payne Mandel

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, yielding 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.

'As if by miracle The Grid manages to conjure a body for the grid in the name of Alice Kober, professor of Latin and mistress of classical languages, many long dead. The linearity of Linear B, a script deprived of sound, preserved in the fiery destruction of the Palace of Knossos, defies the synchrony of the grid. In The Grid, Eli Payne Mandel emerges from the holocaust of these languages with the tablet of Linear B in his hands.” –  Rosalid E. Krauss