little cannibals (μικρές κανίβαλες), by the contemporary Greek poet Niki Chalkiadaki, is a ferociously tender sequence of poems in which a child’s gaze dissects her family, her own body, and the social structures that supposedly instruct and protect her. Speaking from girlhood yet increasingly aware of the adult world’s failures, the young girl in Chalkiadaki’s third collection dwells in a world where play turns violent, and games become traumatic. In these poems, childhood is not a sentimental refuge but a realm where the young-girl speaker constantly straddles the boundary between care and cruelty. Throughout the book, the speaker inhabits a morally unstable space—simultaneously a victim, a witness, and sometimes a perpetrator—where survival demands the cannibalizing of stories, roles, and even loved ones.

With family roots from Crete, Niki Chalkiadaki was born in Trikala and studied Greek literature and linguistics at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. She completed a Master's in Creative Writing at the University of Western Macedonia in Florina and is currently working on a second Master's in Performing Arts. In 2013, her debut poetry collection on my back with fever (Mandragoras, 2012) won the best first book award at the National Symposium of Patras and was short-listed for the Greek National Award for Poetry. Her third collection little cannibals (Mandragoras, 2022) explores "a tender, terrifying, animalistic space where boundaries between real and imaginary are blurred."