Helen of Troy, 1993

Auteur

Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University and has spent several years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Maria’s work has previously appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Helen of Troy, 1993 is her debut poetry collection.

Texte du rabat

"In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, in the early nineties, Helen makes a drastic choice to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a small-town housewife. But in this world of community and tradition, leaving isn't the same thing as staying gone... Rooted in the lush natural world of Middle Tennessee, this debut poetry collection explores Helen's isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality wars against the social rigidity of her community. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, births a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the reader: "if you never owned a bone-sharp biography . . . / i don't want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me." Part retelling, part character study, Helen of Troy, 1993 is a sharp, visceral debut poetry collection that blends the line between myth and modernity with an unforgettable voice that shows the Homeric Helen like she's never been seen before"--