The Grid

In poems and translations, The Grid tells a highly unusual set of stories about the end of the world, ancient and modern.

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Shortlisted 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.