Christos Kanellopoulos
fifty two queens
ed.. A-Z, page 80

Isn’t this the “good” one of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” heroes recovering from a medical wound, and a mere breeze of wind helps him recover? About the wind that reaches the wounded untouched, coming from pure springs, from untouched snowy peaks? It seems that the 52 love stories of Christ Kanellopoulos come, whirling in the wind of a fairy tale, from a correspondingly fresh and at the same time old source of erotic flooding. We are used to the fact that in literature love is either mostly erotic or mostly emotional rather than melodic, but rarely these two things are combined with humor and lightheartedness.

The “queens” in question are surprising because they don’t miss anything, while at the same time balancing in a complex rocker. Creative and bold, gentle and mischievous, sometimes they burn our hearts a little, just enough to remind us of something from adolescence, sometimes they appeal more to the basic instinct that rules a person to the end. There is never only one or only the other. To succeed with pretensions, a recipe needs a particular style, a shape that surprises, a constraint that effectively guides against banality and overflow, a condiment that captivates with its riskiness. Kanellopoulos chooses familiar deck geometry, winking at both humor and noir. This is already a good start. This is an attempt at extreme mixing. Sometimes lyrics and sometimes pornography, sometimes humor and sometimes sadness, sometimes realism and sometimes fantasy – as if to tell us, all weapons are needed in love, where everything is (as you know) allowed. If not in love itself, then certainly in the art that concerns it.

“Queens” is written from the point of view of a person who falls in love, lusts, but above all makes fun of himself. Together with the creatures of his imagination, we will finally know enough about him. That is, although the book at first glance looks like a mini-encyclopedic dictionary of heterosexual male fantasies, it does not describe female queens in some cold, supposedly objective light, regardless of the subject being described. The secondary “I” is carefully delineated, leaving here and there its credentials, suffering, hesitation, fears and prohibitions. As for the queens, the adventure in the life of a man who, pretending to hide behind “his” queens, plays a hidden game of seduction with readers is elliptically crossed out.

He is someone who, in a certain tone, in a certain tone, peeks and bites, talks sweetly and tosses, watches as a third person, and sometimes as “an over-stingy person, the most vicious supervillain of all time”, who, fool, kill the “good queen of hope”. So, we mentally complete the title: 52 queens and their (real, or supposed, or imaginary) lover, “their” card player. Or maybe their poet? We knew Kanellopoulos as a lyricist, screenwriter and performer, including from his collaborations with Kraunakis and Spira-Spira (2000-2001) or the show Heart and Bones. Life and Condition of the Poet N. Lapatiotis” (2006).

His first discussed book of poetry follows the golden rule of “as much as you like”. Next to the “barely naked queen” is the “romantic”, and the “heavy queen” (“My machine gun / My disc gun / My gunboat / Battleship Potemkin / Malysh”) is balanced by the minimalist Ella (“Come, come as you are” ) and Queen Scrooge. Read with bated breath, over and over again.