smoke rose from the cooling grill in inconstant streams,at times hazing around the mounted floodlight, at times indistinguishablefrom the envelope of night. wild things from the woodstreated our home as their home, stealing among the sinks and risesof the land my husband owned and making offwith what they found there; the fence, nearly finished, was new.stars burrowed across a wool shroud, wet lines of vaportracking headlights in the road. i was bending at the kneesand rising again, gathering the white plates from their separate pools of darkness, bringing them upfrom cool and ant-filled grass. i didn’t know i was a personuntil i stopped being one. my mind held this thought only distantlyas i worked, the way a dog barking far-offbecomes to the ear a kind of metallic ringing. the white plates glowed like scattered moons; i could choosewhich one to kneel to next. hinges like birdcall:the screen door slapping against its frame. my husbandon 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.
helen of troy cleans up after the barbecue
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© “From Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems by Maria Zoccola. Copyright © 2025 by Maria Zoccola. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.”
In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying gone…
Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the reader: “if you never owned a bone-sharp biography… / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.”
Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.
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