Z213: Exit
Dimitris Lyacos
 The work recounts, in what reads like a personal journal, in verse form or postmodern poetic prose, the wanderings of a man who escapes from a guarded building in a nightmarish version of a post-Armageddon ambient. The identity of the fugitive or that of his pursuers is never identified in the course of the journey, nor the reasons why he was kept in confinement in the first place. The environment seems to allude to a decadent futuristic state of a totalitarian kind. The journey is not delineated in realistic terms, but expressionistically, creating a feeling of imminent doom which can also be observed in the other two books of the Poena Damni trilogy. This mood is enhanced by the overriding waste-land setting, which could be (it is never explicit) the result of a war that has left the landscape in ruins. The general impression is reminiscent of a spiritual quest or an eschatological experience.