Helen Or My Hunger - Paperback

by Gale Marie Thompson (Author)

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.