Eleni (Helen) Zisimatos is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Vallum Magazine, has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in poetry, and was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch Award, the Irving Layton Awards (in both poetry and fiction), and the Santa Fe Writers’ Awards. She holds degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature, and currently lives in Montreal, Quebec.

"“Eleni Zisimatos opens Nearly Terminal with a Dantean warning: ‘The death of human consciousness is white.’ Yes: To venture onto these imposing white pages is to navigate a blinding snowscape where words are the sparse objects that poke out of the drifts, like inukshuks, suggesting directions and meanings that are impos- sible to pinpoint, to pin down, because they are jests of gestures, as revealing in their amplitude as are ‘Cut up clouds.’ Nearly Terminal recalls Dame Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie, but also John Thompson’s barely there ghazals, all that blank space Blitzkrieg’d by incandescent inklings, those dark flashes of insight amid the vacant, Arctic desert of ‘Such white,’ ‘much despair,’ where winter means erasure, ‘a white eclipse.’” – George Elliott Clarke

“How can we know what is the self? This long-awaited first book from Eleni Zisimatos is a gem of–dare I say it–piezoelectricity. Faceted glints of sound pull off each word surface. Opacity here is a linguistics of nurture, and necessary. Each small kernel of diction counts...absorbs... projects as nervature. Knowing human sadness and difficulty, this poet does not howl. Rather, Zisimatos deftly micro-charges the tune and impasse of her intensely contemplative semantic surfaces into powerful choral actuators of possibility.” – ERÍN MOURE

“It is amazing and inspiriting that Eleni Zisimatos can draw the fresh, unique beauty of Nearly Terminal out of poetry’s engagement with the human dilemma as it exists now. The winter of non- communication takes its present pressing form –‘You cannot come so close./The mark is in the computer’–but this metaphorical winter brings in the saving presence of winter itself, of the real, which always appeals to the human and offers a point of re-beginnings: ‘Such compassion/in a sparrow’s eye.’ The sparse, seemingly contradictory, Celan-like beauty of the first part of Nearly Terminal yields to a more personal and directly espoused second part, and a third part of exploratory affirmation, proposing what Zisimatos calls ‘the / Will that / and.’ In place of the will to power and the will to death, this brilliant and yearning poet would open us, stirringly, to ‘the primal light, the light/Where we understand each other.’’’ – A. F. MORITZ

“To grasp this book, I believe one must pay attention to its title: Nearly Terminal: not terminal. The book contains despair and depression, but that is not what the book is about — The book, at its center, in its roots, is a child of ancient Greece. Two Greek words, akhos, penthos: sorrow and the expression of sorrow by way of singing. Lament—and with everything at stake. The poems, page after page, unmask shallow Truths with fearless honesty. In the end, through this process of winnowing, glimpses of personal truths are revealed, more powerful for the journey dared to unearth them. The process itself a kind of relentless hope. As to craft, the poems — while contemporary to the modern ear and eye — are far from the currently common practice of cutting prose into lines or scattering words across a page. Again, there are, I believe, ancient roots. The poems follow a consistent form recalling haiku and tanka, with characteristic enigmatic phrases and Aha! experience. I highly recommend this book, and suggest reading the poems in order for the book’s full effect.” — Leland James, author of Muse"