Hell Figures

by E. Tracy Grinnell

This series of formally experimental poems explores subjectivity in contemporary wartime and environmental crises via Greek histories.

Hell Figures ventures into the fragmented mythical and literary histories of Helen of Troy, Sappho, Cassandra, Antigone, and others by way of our current condition of perpetual war, violence, and environmental destruction. Grinnell employs the transliteration of musical forms, such as the fugue and humoresque, and homophonic translation as methods of giving form and voice to obscured, inaudible, illegible, unintelligible, and omitted subject positions.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2016

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

[Evan Schwarz]

Thank you Simone for lending me this book I agree that this book is a combination of both of our poetic styles

I like the sapphic ode section, the Humoresque, and the section of the stanzas in reversal (idk the technical term for them) and I like the last section too, between the figures and the elsewhere: notation as relation, for its use of notation and such

I’ll be honest I think I need to reread this, my eyes and mind drifted a lot while reading this which I don’t think is a bad thing I just know there’s deeper mechanics at work here that I’d need to re-approach on a second reading

But it’s fun I like the experimental text, how the text on the page brings you to drift around the words and create meaning in a new way, ya know