Blood Tundra by Sophia Argyris is a spare, vigilant collection in which the body is chronically estranged from itself. Argyris works across numbered incantation, unpunctuated blocks split by white space, and close-set lyric stanzas, with a four-part shadow sequence recurring at intervals, each instalment taking up where the last one broke off. Argyris sets childhood threat, inherited dread, and ecological grief within an idiom of stone, weather, and watchful animals. What emerges is a book preoccupied with methods of disappearance that it keeps rehearsing before deciding, eventually, to stay.
 
PRAISE for Blood Tundra:
Blood Tundra is a fierce and luminous pamphlet where memory, loss, and survival collide. Sophia Argyris navigates grief, survival, and desire with an unflinching gaze, pulling the reader through landscapes of frost and fire, body and shadow. These poems are a study of endurance—of the self, the body, and the planet. Argyris writes with sharp lyricism, weaving tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement. Here, voices rise against absence, against erasure, against the weight of histories both personal and collective. These are poems of reclamation—haunting, visceral, and alive with possibility. Blood Tundra is arresting, unsettling, and unforgettable.
— Vasiliki Albedo
 
A book of incantations, imaginary missives, prophecies, warnings, notes of joy - Blood Tundra is a collection you won't want to look away from. These poems work their subtle magic on the reader, drawing you in.
— Helen Mort
 
ABOUT Sophia Argyris
Sophia Argyris is of British-Greek heritage, born in Belgium. She has been placed in the Ledbury Prize and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in And Other Poems, Berlin Lit, Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, and Poetry London amongst other places. Her pamphlets include Heronless (Palewell Press, 2025) and Blood Tundra (Broken Sleep Books).