reviewed on March 4, 2024

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Though it boasts one of the most compelling titles I have encountered in some time, the editorial framing around Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993 does the collection few favors. 

 

The book is “both formally accomplished and accessible,” explains Scribner associate editor Emily Polson, in a first-page “Dear Reader” preface the likes of which I have never seen.  “You don’t have to be familiar with Greek mythology to enjoy these poems,” Polson encourages, “but if you are, I think you’ll appreciate the Easter eggs.”

 

One might forgive Polson’s zeal to preface her first selection in Scribner’s new poetry list, but the notion that one of the species’ oldest and most ambitious art forms offers “Easter eggs,” as if it were a Marvel movie or Far Cry game, suggests all too clearly the ambit and audience of that list.  Aimed at a popular demographic, HOT, 1993 is “not the product of an elite MFA program,” Polson writes, its author having “drafted these poems on a back porch in Tennessee with her dog Rocky at her feet.” 

 

How, one wonders, did this kind of editorial—trotting out the well-worn Romantic trope of the untaught genius, as if in Walker Evans grayscale—make it to press at a publisher like Scribner?  What are these people doing?

 

Polson’s pitch is belied, moreover, by a back-page biography for Zoccola which celebrates the author’s “writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University”—the former of which, at least, is unquestionably “elite”—and her publications in academic and MFA-run journals such as Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares.

 

One cannot, it seems to me, market a book as a sui generis, salt-of-the-earth “discovery,” on one hand, and as a product, on the other hand, of the most elite institutions in what Charles Bernstein calls the United States’ “official verse culture.” 

 

Such duplicity testifies succinctly—as does much of contemporary poetry, especially as published by the so-called “Big Five”—to that culture’s marketing of itself as somehow counter-cultural, a process of “annexation,” as Pascale Casanova identifies it, in which, driven by a “vogue for exoticism,” major publishers co-opt otherwise “peripheral” authors and collections.  At the risk of self-promotion, I have argued elsewhere that rhetoric like Polson’s—or like Eduardo Corral’s now legendary tweet of December 5, 2017—downplays the influence of enabling institutions while portraying the writer as a resilient “talent,” one whose success comes despite, not because of, her participation in systems of literary licensure.  In 1992, Frances Ferguson traced this kind of “disavowal” to the Romantic privileging of individual expression, describing “a series of self-delusions that involved a mystification of making, as if by calling oneself a genius one could achieve a blissful schizophrenia in which one could imagine that one’s own production was one’s own accident.” 

 

It is hard to believe, in 2025, in accidents.

 

The book itself is fine.

 

Transplanting the events of The Iliad to a fictional Sparta, Tennessee, Helen of Troy, 1993 follows its eponymous working-class heroine from her high-school dalliances through an unfulfilling marriage and desperate affair to the eventual violent consequences of that affair.  Along the way, she cheers at her rural high school’s football games, ice fishes, and—because this is 1993—takes her daughter to see Jurassic Park in theater, so that the banalities of working-class life are lifted in HOT, 1993 into the dignity and splendor of myth.  In an often inspired debut, Zoccola looks frankly at a segment of American culture too little minded and too often stereotyped.  “[A]ctually,” she winks, “there are / ten roads into town and ten roads leaving.”

 

Frequently, however, Zoccola indulges an affected rural folksiness which perpetuates certain insidious images of rural and working-class life.  Here, for instance, are the opening lines of “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine”:

 

            well she cost about a pig and a half but the old girl was sending up the most

pulverizing full-body shakes whenever i loaded her down with more than

just a nightie and the kid’s school duds—whole blesséd homestead brought

to a standstill lord i never knew such a house for turning out dirty laundry—

and i said to the big cheese i said to him not one more evening arm-deep in

drum scut not another night blind-fishing for long johns and boy was i ever

 building up to a real snitty fit-pitching […]

 

My experience may not be representative, but I was born and raised in the rural, working-class town where Whirlpool washing machines are made, and no one ever talked like that.  Zoccola aims in this and other passages at the kind of over-the-top persona one might find in Denise Duhamel or Barbara Hamby, but HOT, 1993 feels more strained in its posturing, the air conditioning always “air-con,” the townspeople of Sparta always “folks.”

 

The book is much better when Zoccola works in plainer, less affected language, writing in which Sparta’s small-town despair—especially the desperation involved in women’s labor—can resonate to more dramatic effect.  In the astonishing “helen of troy cleans up after the barbecue,” for instance, Zoccolo’s speaker exudes all the fraught ambivalence of Brooks’ “Mississippi Mother”:

 

                                                                 i didn’t know i was a person

until i stopped being one.  my mind held this thought only distantly

as i worked, the way a dog barking far-off

becomes to the ear a kind of metallic ringing.

the white plates glowed like scattered moons; I could choose

which one to kneel to next.  hinges like birdcall:

the screen door slapping against its frame.  my husband

on the patio, returning chairs to their ordered line.

it was early fall.  the trees were changing, but the air still burned.

i wore nothing on my arms.  neither did he.

 

It is hard to imagine the profound understatement of the above ending in the voice of Zoccola’s more stereotypical Helen.  It is hard, likewise, to imagine her previously pig-sellin’ and “fit-pitching” Helen rising to as gorgeous and as aesthetically self-reflexive of an image as the above “ordered line” of picnic chairs. 

 

Perhaps Helen of Troy, 1993 suffers, then, from the same kind of double-speak that hampers its editorial preface; an inconsistency in voice runs right down the center of the book, so that Zoccola seems best when she is being herself, less so when striking a pose.

 

As for the book’s “Dear Reader” preface—pitched, it would seem, to the retiree book club, like those interviews with the author and guided questions at the end of novels—one can only hope that Polson’s epistolary editorializing doesn’t repeat itself.