Helen of Troy, 1993

Part myth retelling, part character study, this sharp, visceral debut poetry collection reimagines Helen of Troy from Homer's Iliad as a disgruntled housewife in 1990s Tennessee. In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn't the same thing as staying gone... Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen's isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. 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, gives birth to 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." Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she's never been seen before.

"'The woman, was she / beautiful? It hardly mattered. She'd already turned away, ' writes Maria Zoccola in her debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993. It's thrilling to encounter Helen, a woman villainized and/or victimized in countless Trojan war retellings, in this new light--the sickly neon of the '90s, where affairs begin on the internet and end in a Perkins restaurant. In Zoccola's retelling, Helen has agency--leaving and returning of her own volition. Sometimes, Helen decides to exit the confines of the poem itself--'where is helen? i don't know, or else i would tell you.' This collection is, like the traditional epic poem, sonically beautiful. It demands to be read aloud. It demands to be read again and again." --Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck, "Maria Zoccola's Helen of Troy, 1993 brings Helen to life in the twentieth-century American South--Sparta, Tennessee, where she shops at Piggly Wiggly, calls her sister Clytemnestra on the phone ("cly, you remember when it was us and the boys..."), and lists her pregnancy cravings ("pickles. peanut butter off a spoon. that cereal / with the little blue guys on it"). Zoccola's use of persona and anachronism are transformative, and the formal daring of these poems, including golden shovels from the Iliad, thrilled me. Helen of Troy, 1993 is the most imaginative debut I've read in years." --Maggie Smith, poet and New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, "There is a gracious plenty of grittiness and threat in Maria Zoccola's poems, but the poetry's verbal vitality, coupled with the novelistic satisfaction of the narrator's epic-worthy story, achieves the heightened pain and pleasure of the sublime. I cannot foresee a better book of American poetry published this year." --Ron Rash, award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Serena and Poems: New and Selected

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.