Helen of Troy, 1993

by Maria Zoccola

(Scribner, 2025) 

Reviewed by Katherine Indermaur

In Maria Zoccola’s debut collection, Helen of Greek mythological infamy is recast in the humid glow of rural Tennessee. Caught in 1993 between second- and third-wave feminism, this titular Helen of Troy charges in with a caustic, hilarious, and unmistakable voice dynamic enough to drive the entire book. Watching Jurassic Park, she rhapsodizes:

    i was cheering that damn

    lizard on while it chased down all those folks with their

    miserable problems and unhappinesses and inane little 

    cruelties shared over the dinner table like it’s amazing how

    you spent thirty dollars on blue jeans instead of getting 

    the vacuum fixed it stomped them flat like good night like

    sweet dreams and sayonara 

These persona poems encompass the story of a woman reinventing herself through Zoccola’s reinvention of classic myth, reminiscent of other mythological contemporizing by women like Paisley Rekdal’s Nightingale, Anne Carson’s canonical Autobiography of Red or even Madeline Miller’s bestselling novels Circe and The Song of Achilles.

Myths give us approachable ways into our culture’s narratives and the narratives of our time. As Roberto Colasso wrote in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, “Myths are beautiful muddles and wonderful mirrors in the tangled funhouse of literature where we might glimpse ourselves once more, again and again.” Because we use myths to continually glimpse ourselves, to remake mythological figures as Zoccola does in Helen of Troy, 1993 is to layer and entangle personal endeavors of meaning-making with the broader arc of storytelling that is human history, and women’s place in it. 

Traditionally, Helen of Troy is a tragic and hapless figure. In the myth’s prevailing version, the Trojan War begins when Helen—the most beautiful woman in the world—is abducted from her home and husband in Sparta and taken to marry the Trojan prince Paris. The tragedy does not begin there, however. Helen is conceived when Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, takes on the form of a swan to rape human Leda (famously depicted in Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan”). Greek myth is full of women like Leda and Helen, pawns in the games of men and gods. In the 2024 New York Times article “The Women of Greek Myths Are Finally Talking Back,” Alexandra Alter writes, “Female characters [of Greek mythology] have either been relegated to the fringes, or filtered through the male gaze, depicted as helpless victims, sexual objects, and war prizes. … it makes sense that women are excavating ancient stories and giving new life to female characters whose perspectives have been elided.” Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993 is an assertive part of this movement to vocalize and introduce new agency to these ancient female figures, though it does not require previous knowledge about Greek myth to enjoy the contemporary narrative it presents. 

The best way to introduce the book’s humorous and personable approach might simply be with a litany of its titles: “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine,” “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings,” “helen of troy avoids her school reunion,” “helen of troy cranks the volume on ‘like a prayer’ in the ballet studio parking lot,” “helen of troy runs the station wagon into a ditch,” and “helen of troy reigns over chuck e. cheese,” among others. This tremendous and entertaining debut manages both erudition and approachable ingenuity across its 68 pages.

Amid its Southern setting, Helen of Troy, 1993 triumphantly sings with warmth and wit. Here rural Appalachia is smothering, inescapable—much like the old plot points of myth. In “helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu,” Zoccola writes:

    i walked out into the mass of it, boots

    to my knees against the coiled mines

    of copperheads, my mother behind me,

    watching the sky for a white spread

    of wings. i grew my whole life in a house

    death longed to touch with one soft finger,

    and when i looked out at the building wave,

    i thought, do it.

Here Zoccola complicates the assumption that the women of Greek mythology were helpless or uninteresting simply because things kept happening to them: they got married off, they got raped, they got pregnant, they got murdered. This Helen has a dynamic relationship with fate—do it, she dares. It is less what happens to Zoccola’s Helen that makes her interesting—a lackluster affair that ends in a Perkins restaurant, a daughter’s friend’s birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese—and more her own psychic vitality.

Helen of Troy, 1993 insists on the storytelling of the overlooked. In the book’s opening poem, “helen of troy feuds with the neighborhood,” helen declares—no, demands—“i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.” The book’s most enchanting passages run away with the ecstasy of their own Southern song to further demand such listening. “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly” croons:

         

         … beloved land of madonna on the speakers. country

    of women with cursive lists. everyone i’ve ever known nurses

    their children from these shelves, pushing loads of accreting weight,

    everyone i’ve yet to meet. i high-step through the aisles,

    nursemaid to bread loaves, coupons purse-holstered and waiting.

    sing, muse, of the manager’s special, two-for-one on yogurt cups…

This synthesis of highfalutin ode with the Piggly Wiggly-quotidian produces not only the pleasure of surprise, but the joyous realization that good storytelling is less a product of plot than of voice. Zoccola’s Helen emanates an insistent joie de vivre that churns right on through the plot of her life, no matter how uninspiring it may at first glance appear. 

The book not only gives voice to Helen, but to the women of the neighborhood in a Greek chorus-esque crown of sonnets interspersed throughout. These poems color in the landscape around a fictional Sparta, Tennessee, and provide some of the context for the greater story at work in Helen’s family. In “the spartan women discuss helen of troy,” the collective explains, “a girl was born who was not a swan. / thick-boned, earth-bound, she looked every minute / over her shoulder for the real life / she was promised, but her neck was too short / and she could not see it.” Though Helen could not see it, the reader now can.

Throughout the collection, Helen wrestles with this lack of control she, a nineties suburban American housewife, has over the trajectory of her life. See the unwieldy nature of “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings”: 

    bags of gummy sharks. ice cream, like a lot of ice cream,

    cartons of fudge ripple i pound in one sitting

    with a spoon like a dirt mover, scoop scoop

    down the hole, layers of white ounces plugged

    right into the skin, who was that one wizard in salem

    they squashed to death in a tofu press,

    giles somebody, they just kept piling it on,

    and that sucker smiled his bluebird smile

    and asked for more. cheesecake. jelly rolls.

Even the direction of the poem’s garrulousness seems to ultimately slither out of Helen’s grasp. There is reason to rejoice for this slipperiness, though. How else would we get to “that one wizard in salem” and the other figures populating Helen’s inner life? How else would we relinquish, finally, our own desires and simply “listen”?

Helen of Troy, 1993 is a disarming and marvelous book for every kind of reader, from Greek mythophile to those of us looking for a laugh. Zoccola’s poetry renders a joyride of a character out of an old myth and, like the joyride Helen takes just before wrecking the family station wagon, “why shouldn’t your toes itch / on that pedal so sweet / and easy you might as well / be that sugar from the movies?” Have fun reading about one of the world’s great tragedies? Per the dare Helen herself makes, do it. 

Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Book Award, and two chapbooks. She is an editor for Sugar House Review and the recipient of prizes from Black Warrior Review and the Academy of American Poets. Her writing has appeared in Ecotone, Electric Literature, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, TIMBER, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

 Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens

by Corey Van Landingham 

(Tupelo Press, 2022)

This book meets the moment with prodigious intelligence but, more importantly, with the biggest heart. Drone warfare, long-distance romance, divinity, and art all meet Van Landingham’s eye.

—Katherine Indermaur

Bedtime Stories

by Steve Langan 

(Littoral Books, 2024)

Langan's poems are an embattled form of mindfulness in the age of too much. These poems address the ceaseless noise with self-awareness—that we are all an active part of one problem or another. The book is built from lines that are a form of moving forward, and the knowledge that sentiments such as “life will never be as good / as it is right now” are both a distress call and a prayer.

—Nano Taggart

Come on All You Ghosts

by Matthew Zapruder

(Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

Zapruder is a man who (famously) believes that when you want to say a thing, say it how it is; don’t slather it in unnecessary metaphor. Digression, unvarnished memory, and an ability to step into the lives of strangers are all to be had in a collection that occasionally left me floored—as in the poem “Journey to the Past.”

—Neil Flatman

Daughter Isotope

by Vidhu Aggarwal

(The Operating System, 2021)

Daughter Isotope is like teleporting into an alternate universe. These poems contain everything an alt world should: pop culture, action-packed language and lines, fast

food, innuendo, grief, mythical and religious story, science, space, tech—and let's not forget the rainbows and unicorns. “As stars blow apart so do our virtual mutualities, so do our mutual virtualities, so do our visceral / municipalities, so do our muchacho virilities.” 

—Natalie Padilla Young

Second Empire

by Richie Hofmann

(Alice James Books, 2015)

The lyricism here is astonishing. This collection’s jewel-like poems interweave incisive observation—of urban and natural landscapes—with confessions and epiphanies alike.

—Katherine Indermaur

Like Love: Essays and Conversations

by Maggie Nelson

(Graywolf Press, 2024)

Poet and critical essayist Maggie Nelson draws from twenty years of a writing life in Like Love: Essays and Conversations. Each chapter, set chronologically, includes

reviews; conversations; and—what Nelson does best—razor-sharp reflections on queer issues, art, and love. There exist only a few, Nelson being one, who can use the word love without issuing a single cliché.

—Shari Zollinger

 Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

The Descent

by Sophie Cabot Black

(Graywolf Press, 2004)

If you’ve ever been asked to describe a momentous event and found language wanting, consider this collection. In The Descent, Sophie Cabot Black distills love and loss into a tossed coin that refuses to land. The poetry equivalent of espresso, it makes everything else taste like soy latte.

—Neil Flatman

Quiet Orient Riot

by Nathalie Khankan

(Omnidawn, 2020)

This astonishing debut collection quietly traverses the embattled landscapes of Palestine and infertility. Khankan takes us from border crossing to border crossing, seeking motherhood while wrestling with the promise of sovereignty—for both body and country.

—Katherine Indermaur

The Kingdom of Surfaces

by Sally Wen Mao

(Graywolf Press, 2023)

Every line in Sally Wen Mao’s new collection of poetry oscillates between veneration and evisceration, calling her readers to the bodies of history (ancient Chinese and other) through bowel, breath, and skin. Her sisters “comb their hair, / part it sideways to promise a lifetime of celibacy.” 

—Shari Zollinger

Something I Might Say

by Stephanie Austin

(WTAW Press, 2023)

Stephanie Austin writes in a unique, authentic voice with such seeming ease that I know it is, in fact, her craft and skill that make it so, as the subject matter of multiple losses coupled with caretaking during the pandemic is incredibly difficult to write about effectively. If you're in for personal essay with emotion, you'll be in for this short, but not small, book. It has everything a reader needs.

—Natalie Padilla Young

In the Hands of the River

by Lucien Darjeun Meadows

(Hub City Press, 2022)

Meadows’ debut reads like a queer love letter to Appalachia. Like a good lover or a good trail through a beautiful place, these poems—rich with texture and image—will leave you thirsting for more. 

—Katherine Indermaur

American Scapegoat

by Enzo Silon Surin

(Black Lawrence Press, 2023)

Enzo Silon Surin’s works from American Scapegoat make you feel like you’re witnessing a poetic speaking in tongues. He portrays the human experience through the Black experience in brilliant stanzas, giving tribute to Black activists, poets, and victims of systemic racism. Speakers punch through reality and tell stories that overwhelm with their power and reverence. Surin’s voice, and the voices he presents must be heard and acknowledged in this “postscript of a furious sweat.”

—Clarissa Adkins

Lying In

by Elizabeth Metzger

(Milkweed Editions, 2023) 

Reviewed by Katherine Indermaur

Elizabeth Metzger’s second poetry collection shows us what it looks like when new life starts with the threat of death. Lying In sparks with vulnerability. It pierces through the rose-colored glasses our culture so often slips over our faces when we talk about motherhood. Lying In is an especially important book in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s ruling last year that abortion is no longer a right guaranteed for all Americans.

The titular phrase “lying in” refers to several periods of time around childbirth, from physician-ordered bed rest before the birth to the forty-day period after giving birth where, in many indigenous cultures around the world, new mothers are encouraged to recover by staying mostly in bed. As Lying In opens, Metzger begins with the former experience. While on bed rest, she writes about her son in utero: “In bed what time has done to me is / what it cannot do / to him.” She stays immobile for as much time as her son needs to develop and become ready for the world. The cruel math of parental sacrifice begins. The opening poem moves quickly through labor and birth to milk coming in. In the aftermath, “in some ways I am gone,” Metzger writes. The new life—both the baby’s and the mother’s—subsumes the old.

Perhaps surprising to readers who haven’t experienced postpartum mental health challenges, having a baby doesn’t guarantee the new parent a reason to stay alive. Those hazy and all-consuming first few months often raise more difficult questions than they answer. In “First Wound Kept Open,” Metzger asks:

Of everyone I’ve met 
on earth I always find
they got here first
and will they teach
me their good
reason for staying?

Yet in “Patient Mentality,” the speaker’s medicalized body seems built for persistence: “the voluntary nature of staying alive seemed / obvious / against the red ladder of my body.”

The pregnant, postpartum, or nursing body are a miraculous site not just of creation, but of constant threat and mystery. There is a black box quality to being pregnant. The womb isn’t even that safe or welcoming of a place for new life. In a 2021 episode of the public radio podcast Radiolab, reporter Heather Radke described pregnancy as “a cage match” wherein “on one side is the pregnant person, and on the other side is the fetus. And… in the corner, rubbing the shoulders of the fetus, is the placenta.” For Metzger’s speaker, the memory of that cage match lives on into the new child’s healthy life outside the womb. In “Not My Child,” she writes, “I wish / I could tell why my body appalls me // even though you have thrived. / Nobody died / but that’s just the luck of it.” Luck, black box—the illusion of control over one’s body is stripped away by pregnancy, and it is never fully restored.

Similarly, parenthood is no great force of certainty—no final, true answer. In Metzger’s and my experience, it opens you up to more ambiguity than you knew was possible. “The edges of your death are smudged and round / like ash or a watch / whose accuracy is the least of its worth,” she writes in “The Impossibility of Crows.” New life colored by death. And whether anyone actually died—death’s “accuracy”—is relatively unimportant to these poems’ speaker. Instead, this book upholds a different yet deeply honest kind of worth.

While reading Lying In, I kept thinking about Annie Lowrey’s 2022 Atlantic essay, “American Motherhood,” where she reflects on her two life-threatening pregnancies. In America, “one in five pregnant people experiences a significant complication. And one in 4,000 dies during pregnancy, in childbirth, or shortly after delivering, including one in 1,800 Black mothers,” she writes. Lowrey’s pregnancies left her “disabled, a word I am still struggling to come to terms with. They put my life at significant risk.” In other words, life-threatening and -altering experiences with pregnancy like Lowrey’s and Metzger’s are not uncommon in America. 

In perhaps my favorite poem of the book, “Mother Nothing,” mother speaks to child:

You made the water you broke.
You made me sicker than I could stand
to live a little longer.
For every night there is another night I’ve missed. 
Maybe it is my ambivalence
about being outlasted.
Whenever you are in your crib
my life feels final, or like it has never been.

But this isn’t the last word on the subtractive math new motherhood performs on our lives. There is, somehow, abundance. In one of my favorite images of the book, the speaker of the poem “Desire” says to her partner, after putting their children to bed, “What could you possibly do for my body / when I am in two // separate rooms, / breathing?”

Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books, 2022) and two chapbooks. She is an editor for Sugar House Review and the recipient of prizes from Black Warrior Review, the Academy of American Poets, and Colorado Humanities. Her writing has appeared in Ecotone, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She lives in Fort Collins, CO.

Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

Believers and Seven Sermons from the Bacchae 

by John Tipton 

(Flood Editions, 2022)

This book intersperses new translations of the Gospel of Mark with the ancient Greek tragedy Euripides’ Bacchae and Tipton’s own poetry. Believers will change the way you think about ancient texts and broaden your perspective on time.

—Katherine Indermaur

Be With 

by Forrest Gander

(New Directions, 2018)

Forrest Gander dares to expose shortcomings and grief, revelations, and regrets after the death of his wife (poet C.D. Wright). In Be With, he takes every imaginable color of pain and hurls it through the line until, sometimes screaming and other times in reflection, it says, This is what it’s like to look out at the world in this moment. 

If you want to read a poem once and know everything it has to offer, this isn’t for you. But if you want something that dares you to suggest it might fail, you won’t regret picking up this Pulitzer Prize-winner. 

 —Neil Flatman

Arboretum in a Jar 

by Frances Donovan

(Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023)

“ … I wanna do what I want," from the last line of “Pastoral, Poughkeepsie,” encapsulates Donovan's success at writing poems that, ironically, cannot be contained. She writes a new niche by building up, breaking down, and twisting around the modern fairy tale via her intelligent lens, sharing a unique blend of intimacy and hindsight in this melodious collection. The poet reveals “complicated laces”and "coded secrets" via themes of family, sexuality, and identity, and does so the way she wants—masterfully and beyond comparison. 

—Clarissa Adkins

Our Cancers

by Dan O’Brien  

(Acre Books, 2021)

Twenty years after the events of 9/11, the dust continues to settle—in the Battery Park apartment and surrounding neighborhoods where Dan O’Brien and his wife lived and worked, in their breath and bodies, and in the brief 24 hours in which the one cancer journey concludes only to find another lying in wait. Love and nothingness curl around the enjambments and white space of these 101 terse lyric poems, each of which finds O’Brien acknowledging in new ways that “I must find / my way / to live here.”

—Michael McLane

A Book of Days 

by Patti Smith 

(Penguin Random House, 2022)

A Book of Days includes a picture and a caption for every day of the year, revealing music icon and poet Patti Smith’s solid practice of finding beauty within the mundane and imbuing both the objects and people in her world with a special kind of magic, designating all aspects of her life worthy of inspiration. With spare language and dreamy Polaroids, Patti Smith lays her ardor upon the altar. 

 —Shari Zollinger

Tender 

by Sarah Bates

(New Michigan Press, 2020)

Do you ever tire of poems forcing tidy revelations onto things/states that are defined by disorder? (Hi entropy, have a nice bow!) If the answer is yes, check out this mini-collection. Bates’ availability to the all-too-much-ed-ness of both tragedy and minutiae, and her conveyance of “always starting over”—in topic, in form, and in the act of observation—is breathtaking.

 —Nano Taggart

The Thicket

by Kasey Jueds
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) 

Reviewed by Katherine Indermaur  

Kasey Jueds’ second poetry collection brims with vivacious imagery that encompasses both the enchantment and danger presented by the mysterious natural world. I caught myself returning to the spells cast by these lyrical poems over and over, wanting to steep in this book’s verdant magic as much as fresh air. 

The landscape of The Thicket is one “where the deer / keep their secrets” as much as it is where “winter tenses its solitary muscle, and food // turns scarce.” Elements of the fable and fairytale recur, particularly in reference to the Grimm brothers’ “Little Briar Rose,” often retold now as “Sleeping Beauty.” Throughout the collection, the female speaker’s tender but insistent ethic emerges, one where “nothing at the edge of woods or fall / is meant to be untangled” and still “each softness is kin to the next.” For Jueds, the tangle of this world is what keeps us all looking, and when we are looking together, we can’t help but recognize kinship. 

Perhaps because we are thus implicated in the wilds of The Thicket, familiar spaces appear beyond any fairytale forest. Here, too, is the backyard—the landscaped neighborhood and city streets entangled with abandoned barns and reclaimed meadows. In “Love Poem with No Mountains in Sight,” Jueds writes:

                        A dog barks from streets away
and my heart casts itself past
the tender border her calling makes. As we
are always casting ourselves across edges
and streets, as I once stepped from a curb just when
the icon of the walking figure on the sign began
to pulse, and realized in that second that
I loved you. 

These are the places where we fall in love with one another, the places that hold our first loves and mark us for it. So, too, in “That Far North,” where the speaker breaks out into a rash after having kissed her lover while unknowingly brushing against poison ivy, and is “glad to have . . . / the fire she felt / pressing outward / to make itself known on skin.”  

For a speaker who aims to believe in this ethic she uncovers in the natural world’s profound and apparent entanglement, it is at first surprising how central a role distance plays in these poems. Many depict open spaces, which—while contributing to an abiding sense of calm throughout the work—are not without their difficulty. The speaker is often beckoning, hopeful, as in “The Far Field” (there’s “Far” again): “I could say I do not / know you, don’t understand // what listening I am calling / toward. And still. Come close.” These are places where deer approach close enough for us to note the sun through the translucent edges of their ears, but not close enough to touch. There exists a tension in The Thicket between distance and intimacy, perhaps most memorably depicted in “At Cape Henlopen,” where two lovers embark on a camping trip together:

                                              We walk in light
so steep I can see each single stitch
of your gray sweater, its hem and sleeve; see
for a moment how we’re knitted together
in the wind that keeps tearing us gently from our names.

It takes this distance and the sunlight between them for the speaker to recognize with awe her and her lover’s closeness. It is fitting, then, that Jueds never ultimately disentangles intimacy from distance. This tension is where the sensuality of The Thicket thrives, much like its namesake snarl whose shadow beckons while concealing the thorns we all know are there. 

Jueds also employs repetition toward this sensual effect across the book. A series of five “Litany” poems appear throughout, but Jueds doesn’t limit litany to this series alone. In “Not All the Winds Have Names,” every line begins with the word “body”: “Body of the deep north, the narrow road. / Body remembering: fox in the middle of the harrowed field in a linger of afternoon light.” Such anaphora opens up the realm of the poem to prayer, to magic spell, like the chant inside enchantment. With each iteration of “body,” the text reaches further beyond the page and toward real rhythm, real tongue. It labors to close that distance. 

When The Thicket is at its most lyrical and most pleasurable, it arrives at its most sensual, as in “Of Pink”:

                        You came late
to pink, though pink was always
here. The one who holds
your face in both hands. The one
who says I see you. Nothing silks so. 
Pink of oh. Pink of see-me.
Of labia and lip, of welts
raised by poison ivy on the tender
inlet of wrist.

Jueds has a fantastically skillful ear. Here she builds intimacy by layering vivid imagery atop fricative sound. The way the repeated sibilance in “who says I see you. Nothing silks so” tangles our tongues against our lips is not too far, after all, from any earnest tryst—just far enough for us to see the kinship, and yearn.