Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

by Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s new work that reconsiders the stories of two iconic women―Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy―from their point of view Winner of the Governor General Award in Poetry Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a meditation on the destabilizing and destructive power of beauty, drawing together Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe, twin avatars of female fascination separated by millennia but united in mythopoeic force. Norma Jeane Baker was staged in the spring of 2019 at The Shed’s Griffin Theater in New York, starring actor Ben Whishaw and soprano Renée Fleming and directed by Katie Mitchell.

Genres: Poetry, Plays, Drama, Mythology, Fiction, Classics, Theatre

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 2019

About the author

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a brilliant exploration of the life of women in the spotlight, poet and classicist Anne Carson lays bare the deep continuities of our social world, even as the surface has seemed to change.

We all know something about Helen and Norma Jeane Baker, or at least we think we do. But the narratives that others tell shape our understanding of these two women, merged into one character by Carson. The reality is always more complex than the frames and categories that we all employ to create order out of the maelstrom.

People suffer when they are forced to conform to a constructed, artificial image. Carson's two women can't even choose their names: Norma Jeane Baker becomes "Marilyn Monroe," a name so unfamiliar that she has trouble spelling it when she signs her first autographs, and Helen is now "of Troy," where the lust of Paris, an unknown man, abducts her. Carson helps us see the violence in language.

But Carson also shows that language is slippery and malleable, just like life. She gives her composite character, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a chance to tell a more nuanced story, full of duplicity, shady men, and artifice. NJB of T is spirited away from Troy, and a cloud takes her place, a cloud that thousands of Greeks are killing and raping to capture. But they're fighting for an image, an ideal "whose face launched a thousand ships" and made a thousand paparazzi bulbs flash. They're capturing the cloud, the image of a woman who disappears just as you think you have her.

Norma Jeane and Helen's own stories go deeper than what the camera or the external gaze of an alien poet can capture. But to keep up the artifice and the value they create as a prize for Hollywood moguls and crazed kings, they can't be honest, they can't tell their stories with all the guts and mental gore. If they did, the entire facade would come crumbling down.

Carson, though, gives them a chance to speak, to weave their own tapestries that expose the futility (and even comedy) of their position as desired, beautiful objects. She gives them a chance to tell their stories, even if they can't control the social forces and men who shape every action that constricts and harms them.

"In the halls of Hades, they said I was queen."

[cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow wow wow, i don’t even know what to say about this. but that’s what anne carson often does isn’t it. “sometimes i think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks”

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

god i would die for anne carson. she writes, “sometimes i think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks”.

unbelievable!

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2022...


“En la guerra, las cosas van mal. Culpe a la Mujer.”

Es mi primera aproximación a Anne Carson, apenas leo teatro y poesía, salvo alguna excepción, pero tras la experiencia de inmersión que ha supuesto Norma Jeane Baker de Troya, no tengo ninguna duda de que volveré a Anne Carson, una autora que me intriga muchísimo. En cuanto empecé la lectura de esta obra me dí cuenta, de que aunque conocía mucho el personaje de Norma Jean aka Marilyn, apenas sabía nada de la Helena de Euripides, así que tras una primera lectura de Norma Jean Baker de Troya, me sumergí en la obra de Euripides que creo esencial a la hora de poder apreciar en su contexto esta obra de Anne Carson.

“La verdad es,
ser niña es un desastre.”

Tal como su título indica, Anne Carson superpone en esta obra de teatro poética a dos mujeres, dos iconos sexuales, una de la década de los años dorados de Hollywood, los años 50, y la otra perteneciente a la Grecia del año 400 a.C., Marilyn Monroe y Helena de Troya. La primera fue un mito cinematográfico reconvertido en sexual por los hombres, vapuleada y zarandeada, usada y destrozada, la segunda y según la leyenda, fue la causante de una guerra por culpa de una infidelidad.

¿Una nube?, dirá él. ¿Viajamos hasta Troya por una nube?
¿Vivimos todos esos años con la muerte pisándonos los talones por una nube?
[…]
Una nube viajó a Troya, dije. Y no era yo."

La Helena de Euripides, fue a Egipto durante la Guerra de de Troya y en Troya se quedó una ilusión, una “nube”, una semejanza de ella o también se la podría llamar un fantasma, una especia de doppelgänger falso, ya que la auténtica ni siquiera estaba en Troya cuando se sucedieron los hechos, por eso me parece tan importante leer a esta Helena para abordar la obra de Anne Carson, porque aquí Helena se convierte en una Norma Jeane totalmente introspectiva reflexionando sobre la soledad, los hombres, el coste de una guerra y por supuesto la maternidad, a través de Hermione, aquí también reconvertida en la hija de Marilyn.


"Sobre mi hija,
mi amada, hace tiempo en Nueva York.
Lo que escuchó es
que abandonó la escuela
y se abastece de sus propias sustancias.
Su nombre es Hermione.
Ahora debe tener 17 años.
Una flor dorada de niña.
Una niña frágil.”

Me ha fascinado esa yuxtaposición donde Anne Carson fusiona la Grecia antigua y el Hollywood más devastador, quizá quedándse solo con el esqueleto de dos mujeres que fueron como una sola: desenmascara ese mito sexual que no era más que una mentira y escarba en la esencia de dos mujeres cuya imagen perdura a través de los tiempos. Otros personajes como Arthur, rey de Esparta, que viene a ser la la fusión entre Arthur Miller y el rey Menelao, Truman Capote íntimo amigo de Marilyn, o Fritz Lang director de cine (“¿Quién me salvará de Fritz Lang ahora?”), son tres figuras masculinas que Anne Carson recrea en torno a esta Norma Jean Baker de Troya: tres hombres que existieron en la década de los 50 muy ligados a Marilyn y sin embargo, que podrían haber existido en la Grecia de Helena.

"¿Cómo rescatar ahora el buen nombre de Norma Jean?
¿Cómo explicar todo esto a Arthur?
Arthur, mi buen marido
rey de Esparta y Nueva York,
estimado honorable, anticuado Arthur,
que condujo al ejército de Troya para reconquistarme."

Es cierto que es una obra en la que lo ideal para disfrutarla sería un conocimiento más exhaustivo de la mitologia griega, pero así y todo después de haberme leído la Helena de Euripides, tengo que confesar que me ha encandilado. Cada acto está precedido por una especie de introducción sobre la historia de la guerra y la relaciona también con la etimologia griega, palabras que se relacionan y que Anne Carson recrea para que podamos captar la esencia de estas correlaciones. Norma Jean Baker de Troya se reinventa, se transmuta en todas las mujeres a través de Helena y Marilyn ¿fueron una ilusión creada por los hombres??

“La quiero mucho, pero seamos sinceros
no hay nada mitico aquí.
Ella es solo una pizca de coraje atrapada en un mundo necesitado de trascendencia.”

La experiencia de abordaje de esta Norma Jeane Baker de Troya y de la Helena de Euripides, se ha completado bajo una maravillosa casualidad con Blonde de Andrew Dominik, la esperada adaptación al cine de la obra de Joyce Carol Oates. Una lectura que se podría decir inmersiva e inmensamente gratificante.

"El sustantivo para concubina en griego proviene del verbo que significa, esparcir. Una concubina es una extraña que se esparce en la casa de otra persona, como Helena cuando sigue a Paris a Troya, esperando asimilarse a la textura local.”

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am tired of calling her brilliant, but that's the only description that comes close to addressing the well-cut genius of Anne Carson. In Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, she coalesces Homer's Helen and Hollywood's Marilyn—the two 'sex symbols' of their respective times a few millenia apart—into an instrument and example for exploring what makes beauty baleful. HINT: it is the Fritz Lang, "Arthur, King of New York and Sparta", and Truman Capotes of the world; in equating certain industries with myth and its making Carson may in fact be getting us somewhere. Indeed, her composite heroine here speaks in the shadow of the Helen Euripides too wrote of: a fiction, a mirage, a construct, a cloud, fetishised to the point of war and then blamed for it.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a piece about the violence of language—"sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks"—and the discursive worlds and alienating identities it weaves for women to inhabit. The woman here weaves her own tapestry back with more than a hint of defiance, her eyes on the battlefield and a bowl of whipped cream. She draws on topographies of trauma and turbulence and adds good humour to the mix. She is more, much more, than what narratives allow, and we're given a sense of it.
Sharp, witty, meditative and self-aware, Carson's play exerts a fierce command over the reader's attention and imagination, and manages to extend that rare, stunning delivery on the promise this entails. It ends memorably on paper, and keeps turning up in the mind for long after.

Truly a joy to read, how I wish I could watch this on stage.

[Mina-Louise]

‘Oh I need a drink.
Or a big bowl of whipped cream. I’ve got to think.

NORMA JEANE sits, takes out her knitting.’

I was scared I wouldn’t love this, as it seems a bit obvious. But this was a joy to read, and well-Anne Carson’s words cut like a knife. Best if read in one sitting, I think (it's less than 50 pages so no reason not to, really). The history of war: lessons— brilliant.

‘Truman had a voice like a negligee, always
slipping off one bare shoulder,
just a bit.’

‘Rape
is the story of Helen,
Persephone,
Norma Jeane,
Troy.
War is the context
and God is a boy.
Oh my darlings,
they tell you you’re born with a precious pearl.
Truth is,
it’s a disaster to be a girl.’

‘One thing I learned from psychoanalysis is how to fake it, with men.’
‘— and Dr. Cheeseman went into his Lacanian riff, about how “desire full stop is always desire of the Other capital O”, which I took to mean “visualize Yves Montand when screwing Arthur”…’

‘Psychoanalysts call it triangular desire. But it’s not what most people mean by faking it. They just mean acting. Well, in the first place, acting is not fake. And, number two, acting has nothing to do with desire. Desire is about vanishing.’

Dear god.

‘CASE STUDY: the noun for “concubine” in Greek comes from the verb that means “to sprinkle.” A concubine is a stranger who sprinkles herself into someone else’s household - as Helen does when she follows Paris to Troy - hoping to assimilate herself to the texture there. […] She comes in tracking greek mud all over the floor.’

‘Helen knows dirt. Helen is a death-sprinkler.’

I couldn’t stop writing down brilliance when reading this. But I’ll keep the rest to the book and away from my Goodreads review.

[María Carpio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norma Jean Baker como Helena de Troya. Norma Jean Baker es Helena de Troya. En esta corta obra de teatro, Anne Carson reconstruye el mito de Helena y lo fusiona con el de Marilyn Monroe, mas bien les da una nueva lectura, como una nueva forma de "transformar la versión masculina tradicional" de los iconos femeninos. En este ejercicio teatral-poético, la autora usa la figura de Norma Jean como esa pantalla en la que se reflejan varios personajes y a la vez se refleja ella misma. Norma es Helena, Arthur Miller es Menelao. Pero Norma también es Truman Capote, quizás allí, en esa cualidad de travestimiento, el origen del teatro a la inversa (recuérdese cuando los personajes femeninos eran interpretados por hombres), Carson invierte los roles y narrativas sobre las mujeres y los personajes femeninos. No en vano Helena de Troya y Marilyn Monroe son una construcción icónica desde la mirada masculina, pero también son hitos de la civilización occidental y de la ficción. La ficción y el pretexto de la guerra (real y metafórica) que recae sobre la mujer, y esa fabulación idiosincrática de la mujer como un engaño, una treta, una artimaña. Cada parte de la obra tiene una palabra griega que Carson, como conocedora experta del idioma, usa con precisión para deshilvanar su significado profundo desde el origen mismo de la palabra. Así por ejemplo Kairós con acento es el momento justo para realizar algo, pero Kairos sin acento es el agujero que se forma cuando se va a tejer la próxima puntada. La autora zurce magníficamente esta imagen con aquella otra que eran los puntos mortales (cuello, ingle y sien) en un soldado con armadura de bronce, Kairía: "Su hilo entra y sale de los cráneos vivos". El hilo de Helena, que es un hilo de Ariadna también, que es Norma Jean tejiendo, como teje Penélope esperando a Odiseo. Carson maneja el helenismo al hilo.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful little book that ruins my aversion for awarding five star reviews by simply being brilliant. 68 short pages and ten of those are blank. Wonderfully playful, ceaselessly inventive, funny and sad, and the words…Some of the word-play takes the breath away.
This is a play, rather than a novel, so I should say a word about the structure:
One character – Norma Jeane Baker
One narrator – to provide the HISTORY OF WAR in nine lessons.
Sometimes Norma Jeane plays Mr Truman Capote. That elicits the line:
“I can still hear his funny little girl voice – Truman
had a voice like a negligee, always
slipping off one bare shoulder
just a bit.

Norma Jeane tries to convince us that the Trojan War was a hoax –“Welcome to Public Relations”. In truth a cloud shaped like Norma Jean went to Troy, while she went to LA to rehearse a film for Fritz Lang. The fun and playfulness revolve around these allusions. Her husband is Arthur, “King of Sparta and New York.”
At one point we hear about Hermione, the daughter of Helen of Troy and husband Menelaus, King of Sparta. Every Harry Potter fan, equipped with Google, is probably miles ahead of me here, but I had never realised that Helen had a daughter. Like ‘The Trojan Women’, also a play by Euripedes, Hermione was treated like the spoils of war – married first to the son of Achilles and later to Orestes, the son of her uncle Agamemnon. Norma Jeane mourns her separation.

Most of my observations have to be provoked by the nine HISTORY OF WAR (HoW) lessons. They start with words written in Greek and often provoke some comment on the translation of those words. My computer isn’t going to let me quote the Greek.
HoW 2 contains a wonderful line: “War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t.
Both carry wounds.”
HoW 3 is on the theme of “To take”. We have a lesson about the Greek verb to take which has become rapio, rapere in Latin and give us words like rapture and rape in English – “words stained with the very early blood of girls…” The lesson ends with this stunning line: “Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.” Wow.
HoW 4 is a gem. We debate how the economies of ancient Greece and early modern America depended on slavery. Then this line:
“Because ancient slavery was not predicated on any pseudoscience of genetic inferiority, kings and queens and movie stars, as well as bakers and barbers, were in theory but a city’s fall away from servitude…” I so love that phrase – a city’s fall away from servitude.
The lesson goes on the point out that Helen was lucky enough to get her positions back – as wife and queen, not a slave or a soldier’s wife, “although technically, legally and hygienically she was dirt”.
HoW 5 talks about dirt and the Greek word for concubine. “Dirt is something that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed.”
The Greek noun for concubine comes from the verb to sprinkle. “A concubine is a stranger who sprinkles herself into someone else’s household – as Helen does when she follows Paris to Troy.”

HoW 8 talks about killing a man in the bronze armour of helmet, breastplate and grieves. The neck and groin were more exposed and wounds there would lead to a slow death. For a more instant impact, the place where the helmet stopped above the eyes, the temple, was best. The three locations were called the kaipīa, mortal spots, from the Greek kaipōs meaning “the exact right place and time for something to happen…”
The same word with the accent on the first syllable, kaīpos, “was a technical term from the art of weaving to indicate the thrum of the web or, more specifically, the crucial point in space and time when the weaver must thrust her hand through the gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth.” I love the parallels, as Helen sits weaving a tapestry of the battle in which men give their lives for her.

I hope this doesn’t spoil the narrative in any way, but gives you enough of a taste to want to read the whole thing.

[Johan Thilander]

Carson kan vara så här modern eftersom hon är en så fulländad klassicist:

när grekerna drog upp sina skepp på stranden vid Troja
kunde de se den mytomspunna staden glittra knappt en
fotbollsplan bort.

[Emmkay]

Nominally a play, but more of a staged poem (very hard for me to picture the staging though) drawing parallels across the centuries between Norma Jeane Baker/Marilyn Monroe, Helen of Troy, and other famously desired women, in which it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Rape
is the story of Helen,
Persephone,
Norma Jeane,
Troy.
War is the context
and God is a boy.
Oh my darlings,
they tell you you’re born with a precious pearl.
Truth is,
it’s a disaster to be a girl.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There is a stark awareness nowadays that we need new ways of thinking about female icons like Helen or Marilyn Monroe, new ways to revolve the traditional male version of such events 180 degrees and find different, deeper sorrows there” .
.
Norma Jean baker of Troy is Anne Carson’s new 68 page meditation on the destabilizing and destructive power of beauty. She’s uses Euripides’ story of Helen as a background to the narrative told combining Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. Even though they were separated by thousands of years they still were fetishized and devoured by the male psyche and held up as a benchmark for female beauty and representation in the eyes of the world. .
.
This collection spans from the chateau Marmont to the battlefields in Greece with cameos from the men and industry that brought their inevitable ruin and written with such fervent poetry and conviction for the awareness their stories brings Carson wrote it best when she said “sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks”

[grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was extraordinary, exhilirating, raw. enter norma jeane baker as marilyn monroe, who is so unfamiliar with who the public sers her as that she does not know how to spell her own name the first time she gives an autograph. enter norma jeane baker as helen of troy, 'of troy.' "a cloud went to troy." ten years at troy over a cloud, a public image of helen that the men were so obsessed with that could drift away just when you're close to touching it. norma jeane as marilyn as helen as norma jeane "weaves/knits" the narrative that "desire is about vanishing."

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued by descriptions of the original stage production of this last year, with Ben Whishaw and Renee Fleming - but it appears that MOST of what intrigued me was added by director Katie Mitchell. Aside from the central conceit, and a few clever or funny passages, this didn't really grab me - it's much more of a tone poem than a play. But I DID read it on Mr. Whishaw's 40th birthday - so happy BD, Ben! :-)

[Sally Elhennawy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks” this book isn’t technically poetry but I think everything Anne Carson writes is poetry so

[Seth Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've gotta say, as my first foray into Anne Carson's poetry, I'm incredible impressed. While the conceit - an interpolation of two mythologised women - isn't exactly groundbreaking, her delivery of this concept is gorgeous. Carson has a lyrical sensibility that I would happily ascribe any number of superlatives to. Sumptuous, ethereal (I hate that word but it feels appropriate here), histrionic (in a strangely controlled sense). I'm going to need some time to intellectually dissect what I've just read, but my immediately emotional response is strong. A comfortable, broad recommendation.

[Eileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a little volume to read over and over.

It also launched an hour-long, wine-primed argument between my mother and myself wherein she believed we were debating Anna Nicole Smith the whole time, rather than Norma Jean Baker. So. It'll bring all manner of fantastic things into your life.

But really. Anne Carson is unparalleled. 5 stars.

[Prince Mendax · Rating 5 out of 5]

ja. min 16 års långa kärleksaffär med anne carson fortsätter...

[Sammy Mylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

68 pages of pure poetic genius !! AHHH it’s so short but every line is so layered with meaning

[målly]

anne carson ultras. borde nog läsa på engelska också

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

what!! a lovely number! thank you kate this is maybe the most anne anne gets & we're all down 4 that. dirt

[Marissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some years ago, at a festival of new plays inspired by Greek mythology, I won a copy of Marilyn Monroe's autobiography in a raffle. The play that evening was a modern take on Helen of Troy, and the playwright said he’d read Marilyn’s book as research, to get a sense of what it was like to be the most beautiful woman in the world.
 
So Anne Carson isn’t the first playwright to link Helen and Marilyn. Although, even though Norma Jeane Baker of Troy was shelved in the library’s Drama section and I first heard about it when I read reviews of the 2019 New York production, it doesn’t feel much like a play. Sure, there are sections written as monologues delivered by Helen/Norma (or sometimes by “Norma Jeane as Mr. Truman Capote”) but they are interspersed with mini-essays that reflect on the etymology and meanings of various Greek words. There is no indication of who should deliver the “essay” sections or how those should be staged. Moreover, according to reviews, the New York production was set in a midcentury office and involved Ben Whishaw transforming himself from a staid businessman into a glamorous Marilyn impersonator over the course of the play. But none of those elements—the office setting, the use of a male actor as the main performer—are found in the text.
 
Okay, so even if it’s not exactly a play, is it meritorious in other ways? I read it pretty quickly, which might be a mistake—this is poetry in a way, and poetry is meant to be savored—but I didn’t feel like it said much that I hadn't already seen in other feminist reinterpretations of Greek myth. (True, I've seen a lot of those, cf. my involvement with the aforementioned theater festival.) It's not news that men feel entitled to beautiful women and lash out with violence when denied access to them, nor that the mythic image of a beautiful woman can supersede her flesh-and-blood reality. Here, Carson follows Euripides in saying that Helen actually waited out the Trojan War in Egypt, and the "Helen" walled up in Troy was just a simulacrum made of clouds. Similarly, the shimmering silver-screen image of Marilyn has superseded the actual woman who was Norma Jeane.
 
Around the same time Norma Jeane Baker of Troy was playing in New York, Hadestown was opening on Broadway and cleaning up at the Tony Awards. That show also blends a well-known Greek myth and 20th-century American iconography, and Anaïs Mitchell doesn’t have the highbrow pedigree that Anne Carson does, but I find it so much more accomplished as a piece of theater and as a way of making an old story feel relevant.

[Robin Tobin (On the back porch reading) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes the greatest treasures have the fewest pages... This is a true Master Wordsmith slicing through written verse like fine bourbon.

[jada alexis]

the past 24 hrs have punched me repeatedly and this is what called.

[deniz eilmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

im still in awe of how magical this is.
"sometimes i think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks" still has a hold on me.

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

really good one to read right after the trojan women

[ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

whoa

[𓆩♡𓆪]

s. 51-53 🖤💔

[lucy thorpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devoured on a fine Sunday afternoon😋😋 I wish I had seen this when it was live in New York because it is very cinematic. Carson has a knack for the dramatic and tragic… I want to be her when I grow up

[ciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much is happening here in the very best way on so many levels and i would LOVE to see this live.

Love how she explores Euripides' (and maybe Stesichorus acc to wikipedia) εἴδωλον concept, i.e., that Helen of Troy never physically was in Troy. Also, the short but intense dive into trauma, role/ objectification of women in patriarchy, and loathsomeness/ pointlessness of war (led by men).

VERY excited about the Persephone strand here; it substantially produces an echoing of 'Averno' (Louise Glück). THANK YOU, kate xxxx

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I adore AC but I just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ with her stuff like this. I'm glad others seem to have gotten so much out of this, but for me it felt like a lot of interesting ideas—& beautiful individual lines—in need of the context provided by performance & the theater space.