Roots is a book of poems, a project worked on for about five years. The title suggests its interior: It is not a final summation of a life, but a solidification of teenage and childhood reflections, a passage of time that was pondered and seen and smelled and thought and lived, a tiny window to the past of a mind. Roots opens readers to a different kind of poetry- one that attempts to explain aspects of human emotion as it embeds and weaves its way through the human psyche. The book travels on dark highways, up cool trees and into the future, to distant lands and in close by neighborhoods. But somehow, it is always finding its way back to the confines of the familiar bones, just beneath everyone's skin. Its mysterious and often visceral undertones have different interpretations with each read, and open a wide array of thought on the intonation of words and their uses in the warped version of the English language utilized in this book. It's the sort of writing that doesn't have to make sense to make feeling. It's not just a book about love, or darkness. It is for the Wandering, the Wondering, the Hopeful, the In Love, the Out of Love, the Old, the Young, the Dead, the Alive. Rest assured that for every person that picks up the book, at least one of the themes, in its strange expression, will resonate with them.
About the Author: Erini Sappho Katopodis was born in 1995 and raised in South Pasadena, California. She had already earned the name "book shredder" from her constant reading by age 8, where she found her passion in writing. A first-generation American, she speaks fluent Greek and often incorporates her culture and language into the cadence and diction of her poems. Her summers on the Greek islands of Ikaria and Lefkada and the natural world were some of her first inspirations. Now, 20th century science fiction and French/Russian philosophy mainly influences Erini's writing-- she accredits her style to authors like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Jean Paul Sartre, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pablo Neruda, Neil Gaiman, Sappho, Jim Morrison, Roger Waters, David Byrne and many others. Besides writing, Erini also has an impassioned interest in music, film, travel, and art. Strong visual metaphor users in film, like Kubrick, Yimou, Singh, and Tim Burton, have especially made impressions on her artistic studies. Classic rock and the blues, mainly on vinyl, also inspire writing and songwriting, where she meshes traditional blues with rock and poetry.