Helen Or My Hunger

Gale Marie Thompson

ISBN 10: 1936919842 / ISBN 13: 9781936919840

Published by YesYes Books, 2020

About this Item

Helen or My Hunger is a looping, serial sequence that explores the relationship between memory, language, the body, and power. In dialogue with H.D.'s 1961 epic Helen in Egypt, these poems address the eidolon>of Helen of Troy: the echo of an echo. They question notions of beauty and the body by communicating with this absence, sustaining this unsustainable dialogue. Ghost? Icon? Mother? Friend? These poems address the ruptures of trauma, violence, with mythology and lineage, with the inevitable failings of gender and the body.The core of Helen or My Hunger>contains, and at the same time rejects-tries to distract itself from-the material of the writer's life and body. These poems reckon with hunger, desire, and shame, and with the violence of language and representation (body as icon, as seat of trauma). Helen or My Hunger>asks: how can we live in a world where both private and public pain resist language? How can we mark differences, but also make visible the samenesses? What violence do we sanction through language, through narrative, through form? In a sequence that resists its own formation, Helen or My Hunger>wonders how to live in a world that seeks to reduce, to wound, what it cannot contain.

Seller Inventory # CIN1936919842G

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Helen Or My Hunger
• Publisher: YesYes Books
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1936919842
• ISBN 13: 9781936919840
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Helen or My Hunger is a looping, serial sequence that explores the relationship between memory, language, the body, and power. In dialogue with H.D.'s 1961 epic Helen in Egypt, these poems address the eidolon of Helen of Troy: the "echo of an echo." They question notions of beauty and the body by communicating with this absence, sustaining this unsustainable dialogue. Ghost? Icon? Mother? Friend? These poems address the ruptures of trauma, violence, with mythology and lineage, with the inevitable failings of gender and the body.

The core of Helen or My Hunger contains, and at the same time rejects-tries to distract itself from-the material of the writer's life and body. These poems reckon with hunger, desire, and shame, and with the violence of language and representation (body as icon, as seat of trauma). Helen or My Hunger asks: how can we live in a world where both private and public pain resist language? How can we mark differences, but also make visible the samenesses? What violence do we sanction through language, through narrative, through form? In a sequence that resists its own formation, Helen or My Hunger wonders how to live in a world that seeks to reduce, to wound, what it cannot contain.

About the Author

Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Helen Or My Hunger (YesYes Books, 2020), Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015), and two chapbooks, including Expeditions to the Polar Seas (Sixth Finch, 2013). Raised in Georgia and South Carolina, Gale received a B.A. from the College of Charleston, an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, BOAAT, Gulf Coast, Tin House Online, Guernica, jubilat, and Bennington Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and has given workshops and craft talks for the Emily Dickinson Museum, O, Miami Foundation, Midwest Writing Center, and others. Gale is the founding editor of Jellyfish Poetry and has worked on the editorial teams of jubilat, Crazyhorse, Fairy Tale Review, Georgia Review, and Slope Editions. She lives in the mountains of North Georgia, where she directs the creative writing program at Young Harris College.