Twenty poems and eight drawings interact in this slim poetry compilation that was jointly published by Moloko Plus and Sea Urchin in December 2021. Anna Niarakis’s concise and intelligent poems capture universal themes such as death, love, loss and the passing of time in a clear and original language, while the images they evoke flare passionately against a backdrop of existential absurdity. Schot’s ‘hard black’ drawings reject all shades of grey and bring together deliberate and accidental lines in images that appear to be on the verge of obliteration. Sunrise over nothing is then a fitting title for this powerful combination of poems and drawings, which was even further invigorated by Anneke Auer’s refreshing design.
Anna Niarakis was born in Athens, Greece on 10 May 1979. She lives in Paris, where she works as a Professor of Systems Biology at the University of Evry, Paris-Saclay. Among her earlier poetry compilations are Lab Notebook (Charamanda Publications, 2010), The Fishphone (Gavriilides Publishing, 2015) and The Angel’s Share (Bibliothèque Publications, 2019).
Ben Schot (1953) is a Dutch artist and publisher from Rotterdam. He has illustrated works by Georg Trakl, Gustav Sack and Georg Heym for Moloko Plus and has run his own publishing house Sea Urchin Editions since 2000.