Leukadia

by E. Tracy Grinnell

Genres: Poetry

About the author

E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Helen: A Fugue (Belladonna Elder Series #1, 2008), Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006), and Music or Forgetting (O Books, 2001), as well as the limited edition chapbooks Mirrorly, A Window (flynpyntar press, 2009), Leukadia (Trafficker Press, 2008), Hell and Lower Evil (Lyre Lyre Pants on Fire, 2008), Humoresque (Blood Pudding/Dusie #3, 2008) Quadriga, a collaboration with Paul Foster Johnson (gong chapbooks, 2006), Of the Frame (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2004), and Harmonics (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 2000). Grinnell’s poetry has been translated into French, Serbian, and Portuguese. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute, Brown University, and in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the founding editor and director of Litmus Press.

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine a fresh take on Sappho that starts not with the poet, or her fragments, but with the name of the cliff she threw herself from, reflected in fall by the sea. The emphasis shifts from subject (the “real” Sappho, recovering the poems, etc.) to questions of perspective and edges and angle of vision: the conditions of visibility—subjectivity—itself. Leukadia re-envisions Sappho as a litmus for our own ends and limits, the poet a double that figures the patriarch’s fear and the margin’s desire, “Echo that won’t echo” until we learn to assemble our selves around the things it refuses to say. As Grinnell describes Sappho (and Helen & Cassandra) in the exchange with Bhanu Kapil at the end:

“Multivocal echo chambers—at the same time, the “striking” word for deep sleep: [koma:], the trance, the sleep, the silence silenced, the spoken for—the threshold speech encounters, the threshold that prevents speech, or distorts—trapped on one side of the mirror—madness!—the fugue—”

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

A meditation on failed loves and discarded lives, Grinnell's book takes its title from the cliff Sappho is supposed to have thrown herself over, but in the aggregate of the text Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" also haunts. Reflective (even to the point of including an early "END" and a 'companion text'), Grinnell restores fluidity to the mirror of the text, making of it a water in which her heroines are both lost in a set (in the musical sense) of over-lapping surfaces and saved, "alone amidst the sea."

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

against the face a force


Imagines emerging