Gale Marie Thompson announces new book, Helen or My Hunger

Gale Marie Thompson (KHN ALum 2016) announced that her new book, Helen or My Hunger, was published in October by YesYesbooks.

Helen or My Hunger is a book-length sequence that explores gender and the body through a conversation with the “eidolon,” or image, of Helen of Troy. Helen reckons with hunger and desire, with trauma and shame, and with the violence of language and narrative. You may appreciate this book especially if you are interested in mythology, book-length poems, gender studies, mental illness, or Modernism.

In Helen or My Hunger, Gale Marie Thompson explores notions of beauty and the body in ways that illuminate—and damn—both the personal and historical. How do we become fully human in a world that conspires to reduce us both figuratively and literally? Thompson digs into these difficult questions and their tough answers, and the results are nimble, inventive, beautiful poems, as pleasurable to read as they are important to digest.—Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence

Every woman is a Trojan horse. Her body, crafted, redacted, angled, gets you through the gates. But what does it conceal? Complexity, time, betrayal, urgency? "I AM IN PAIN AND THEREFORE MY WRITING IS THIS WAY" says Thompson’s speaker. The poem, too, a Trojan horse and a "catch-all," a place to bide one's time, to sift through longing, to become liquid again. "Helen, I see myself  edging  bright  to  you / I need your  lineage / your  tender  voltage." And we do. See you on the banks of hunger, sisters.—Danielle Pafunda, author of Spite