Heart, Speech, This

There are stories within stories in this book, myths and memories and might-have-beens. Love stories, ruptures, alienations. Here is what the book came to be: seven series of poems exploring women of Greek myth, each series with its own poetic form and voice, interrupted and conversing with poems more contemporary, less narrative, in both traditional and nonce forms. These women, some goddesses, some mortal, some half-mortal, half-divine, are more often described than given voices in the myths. Although the myths explored are Greek with Roman additions, many of the poems evoke other parts of the globe. Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Italy, England, Arizona, New Mexico, New York, Japan-the poems wander and tangle themselves in places and times of earth and sea and fire. Exile is as strong a theme of love fractured and made more than it was.

"Scheherazade" opens "heart", the first half of the book, with warring desires between words and sense-hunger, thirst, and affection grabbing for the space that wanted to be a story. And the story becomes the "fleet desire" of Diana chased by Actaeon, Orion, and the dogs with which they hunt. Diana is followed by Persephone, confused by her own violent responses to desire, and Persephone gives way to Psyche and the desperate, impossible work of rescuing the disappeared. Athena finds desire within herself and the development of strength in isolation, refusing just as her half-sister Diana to be caught. "Speech", the book's second half, goes deeper into ambiguous loss with the experiences of women at war-Leda's rape, Penelope's wait for Odysseus, Helen's infidelity and return, Athena's anger, Athena's peace. They are women connected by blood as well as conflict, and my re-tellings of their myths imagine greater independence, justice questioned and applied, resolutions that sustain the impossibility of solutions.


Gina Rae Foster is a poet, theorist, teacher, facilitator, filmmaker, and nonprofit administrator in New York City. She holds advanced degrees in both
Theology and Creative Writing as well as certification in International Trauma
Studies. She is completing her doctorate in Media & Communication through
the European Graduate School.