About Christopher Bakken
Christopher Bakken
Christopher Bakken, is the author of the culinary memoir, Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table, as well as four books of poetry, Driving the Beast (forthcoming 2025), Eternity & Oranges, Goat Funeral and After Greece. He is also co-translator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and Best American Poetry 2016. Bakken holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from University of Houston, and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University. He has twice served as a Fulbright Scholar, at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and at the University of Bucharest, and he is currently the Frederick F. Seely Professor of English at Allegheny College. Bakken won Food & Wine Magazine’s Best Burger Contest in 2005 and has cooked live on the CBS Saturday Morning Early Show. He organizes an organic produce cooperative out of his garage in Pennsylvania.
Eternity & Oranges
“We’d not slept in days, or else we were/ still sleeping—who could tell?” someone asks in the opening poem of Eternity & Oranges. The voices we encounter in this book speak on the verge of disappearance, from places marked by disintegration and terror. Christopher Bakken’s poems are acts of conjuring. They move from the real political landscapes of Greece, Italy, and Romania, into more surreal spaces where history comes alive and the summoned dead speak. In the formally diverse long poem, “Kouros/Kore,” but also in this book’s terse and harrowing dream songs, Bakken writes with devastating force, at every turn “Guilty of the crime of praise” while “begging for an antidote to beauty.”
“This is a beautiful collection of poems: half-cryptic, half-open; half based on ancient myths, half on actual life. There’s almost always Greece as the backdrop, olives and the sea but also a human drama. Christopher Bakken proves that what’s ancient is also modern and vice versa. We live between times; only poetry can make it palpable.”
—Adam Zagajewski
“Eternity & Oranges is a beautifully crafted book of apprehensions, the apprehensions chiefly of death as furnished by sea, love, politics, and separation. It moves through Greece and the Balkans watching scenes darken and divide. The unsaid haunts the book with its degrees of saying. It is what the skin of poetry is for: to contain the flesh and nerves while bearing whatever life inflicts on it.”
—George Szirtes
Read reviews of Eternity & Oranges at Pleiades: Literature in Context, The Literary Review, and American Microreviews.
Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table
Combining the best of memoir, travel literature, and food writing, Christopher Bakken delves into one of the most underappreciated cuisines in Europe in this rollicking celebration of the Greek table. He explores the traditions and history behind eight elements of Greek cuisine—olives, bread, fish, cheese, beans, wine, meat, and honey—and journeys through the country searching for the best examples of each. He picks olives on Thasos, bakes bread on Crete, eats thyme honey from Kythira with one of Greece’s greatest poets, and learns why Naxos is the best place for cheese in the Cyclades. Working with local cooks and artisans, he offers an intimate look at traditional village life, while honoring the conversations, friendships, and leisurely ceremonies of dining around which Hellenic culture has revolved for thousands of years. A hymn to slow food and to seasonal and sustainable cuisine, Honey, Olives, Octopus is a lyrical celebration of Greece, where such concepts have always been a simple part of living and eating well.
THE LIONS' GATE
Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios
Translated by Christopher Bakken & Roula Konsolaki
Truman State University Press, 2007
Titos Patrikios is a poet of witness and engagement. A member of the intellectual left in post-war Greece, he survived imprisonment, hard labor, censorship, and exile. He narrowly escaped death by firing squad, and once had to bury his poems to keep them from disc
GOAT FUNERAL
Sheep Meadow Press, 2007.
“Whether writing of the Greek landscape, purgatory, Paul Celan, El Greco, or the late Bill Matthews, Christopher Bakken in sinewy, sculpted lines succeeds in embodying an unknown yet knowable world in all its textures and contours. If poetry is the being there of authentic existence, then the poems of Goat Funeral constitute a double triumph, both aesthetic
AFTER GREECE
2001 T.S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press)
After Greece is a fruit not of tourism but of a loving quest for the substance of our culture; Christopher Bakken’s beautiful book inscribes itself into a dignified tradition of traveling to the countries of the richest past without giving up the sometimes skeptical lucidity of our present moment.
—Adam Zagajewski