Who's Afraid of Helen of Troy?: An Essay on Love

by David Lazar

David Lazar extends the language of prose poetry, mixing the classical and the high modern, the song and dance man and the Odyssean. Nothing, he finds, is as far apart as we think, except for the chaos and order, innocence and experience. Lazar’s voice is a sacred last something’s gotta give. The voice in these poems is semi-autobiographical and masked yet emotionally raw. Each poem draws on the features of modernist poetry, using an arch, cadenced sentence as its primary unit, but drawing on the Iliad , Odyssey , and other classical myths as part of its internal cosmos.

72 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 2016

About the author

David Lazar’s books include essays: Occasional Desire, (Nebraska) and The Body of Brooklyn (Iowa); prose poetry: Powder Town (Pecan Grove) nonfiction anthologies: Truth in Nonfiction (Iowa), After Montaigne (forthcoming from Georgia), and Essaying the Essay (Welcome Table Press); and interview collections: Michael Powell: Interviews and Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher (both Mississippi). He has lectured widely on nonfiction and editing, and founded the Ph.D. program in nonfiction writing at Ohio University, and directed the creation of the MFA program in nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches. He is the founding editor of Hotel Amerika, now in its fourteenth year.