The Grid

Eli Payne Mandel’s The Grid comprises three sections and opens with the titular sequence of 125 short prose pieces, all focused on the life and work of Alice Kober, an American classicist who helped decode Linear B. Anecdotes about Kober are interspersed with Mandel’s translations of Mycenaean fragments, as well as works by Homer and Horace. An ordinary spice-list from roughly 3,000 years ago makes for a mysterious found-poem:

[sa]-sa-ma <| [1]
ma-ra-tu-wo <| [1]
sa-pi-de [6]

[…]
SESAME SEED [UNIT] [1]
FENNEL SEED [UNIT] [1]
BOXES [6]

“Screen Memory,” the second part of this collection, reads like the jottings of an erudite ghost with a taste for role-playing: a famous Nigerian painter, or a “false marabout” asked to parse a sentence in Arabic. In “The Earth Shall Run Damp with Sweat,” the “I” turns to vapor:

I stare with such intensity that I exit the train through an emergency window. I am moving very fast. My edges begin to flare with blue heat. During the instant it takes to pass through the main cellblock, I see a toothbrush and a halogen light […] I sail out over the water like a live coal.

The third part, “Letters of Last Resort,” includes, among other things, Mandel’s translations of several epistolary poems by Ovid and a poem-letter from a “Chronographer of the Year 354” who worries about the empire’s supply of gin.

Mandel’s book quests after the ancient world with a disarming spirit of curiosity, charming the dead while asking them to come out and play. In one of several missives titled “Letter from Ovid,” the speaker’s mind “drips away […] as scabrous rust gnaws iron / so my heart is eaten without end.”