Helen Or My Hunger

by Gale Marie Thompson

In Helen or My Hunger, Gale Marie Thompson explores notions of beauty and the body in ways that illuminate—and damn—both the personal and historical. How do we become fully human in a world that conspires to reduce us both figuratively and literally? Thompson digs into these difficult questions and their tough answers, and the results are nimble, inventive, beautiful poems, as pleasurable to read as they are important to digest.
—Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence

Every woman is a Trojan horse. Her body, crafted, redacted, angled, gets you through the gates. But what does it conceal? Complexity, time, betrayal, urgency? "I AM IN PAIN AND THEREFORE MY WRITING IS THIS WAY" says Thompson’s speaker. The poem, too, a Trojan horse and a "catch-all," a place to bide one's time, to sift through longing, to become liquid again. "Helen, I see myself edging bright to you / I need your lineage / your tender voltage." And we do. See you on the banks of hunger, sisters.
—Danielle Pafunda, author of Spite

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

Published June 23, 2020

About the author

Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Helen Or My Hunger (YesYes Books, 2020), Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015), and two chapbooks, including Expeditions to the Polar Seas (Sixth Finch, 2013). Raised in Georgia and South Carolina, Gale received a B.A. from the College of Charleston, an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, BOAAT, Gulf Coast, Tin House Online, Guernica, jubilat, and Bennington Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and has given workshops and craft talks for the Emily Dickinson Museum, O, Miami Foundation, Midwest Writing Center, and others. Gale is the founding editor of Jellyfish Poetry and has worked on the editorial teams of jubilat, Crazyhorse, Fairy Tale Review, Georgia Review, and Slope Editions. She lives in the mountains of North Georgia, where she directs the creative writing program at Young Harris College.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book openly struggles with the mythic image built around women, how a woman can feel beholden to that image, the cultural sign evoked by this image, and what seems to be a lifetime where the poet is left humanizing what the image of woman means, while also acknowledging the paradox that women are human. The woman in question is Helen. I would argue it’s a problematic choice for the book. And an apt choice. Because there’s not a lot written about the woman Helen. She’s barely mentioned in The Iliad, as Thompson remarks in her Notes at the end of the book.

I would personally set the book among a couple that consider the archaic frame put on women, like Natalie Eilbert’s Swan Feast and Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, and what that might mean in 21st Century America. Eilbert’s Swan Feast has the strongest parallel. Both Thompson and Eilbert position a mythic female figure at the center of their books, and both books engage in conversation with that female figure, as though speaking to her even when you know she can’t say anything back could lead to a further understanding. The poems also recognize in their one-sided conversation that the figure (the Venus of Wallendorf for Eilbert and Helen for Thompson) was never really given a voice. Both poets speak to this blank space, mourning the blankness and recognizing the implications of so much having been projected onto this blank space, especially by men. And, as women, they are going to unsettle what has been associated with this figure.

What it means, however, for Thompson to be unsettling the conventions around Helen is arguably the book’s biggest ambition. She explains at one point that the poem had started as a research project, but then she admits that that frame wasn’t capable of accounting for her personal understanding of Helen, and the book should be as much about the personal as the researched. And the unresolved cross-purposes mark the book’s primary vehicle. I’m not sure I’m always able to feel the crucial nature of this intersection, however. I can understand its presence. And I can see where the book juxtaposes both sides to make it substantive. I can even go so far as to wonder why the poet focuses on this figure. And to see how this could be commentary on the mythic position of Helen. Why do all these men do such extreme things “for” Helen? And how can a book, like The Iliad, which is so dynamic in its treatment of men, motivations, and masculinity, be so blank in its treatment of Helen, reducing her to the role of fixture rather than human? I recognize these critiques of that epic poem already exist. For me, however, Thompson’s book occupies Helen’s position to the exclusion of the men. Partly because her researched sources (most notably HD’s Helen in Egypt) offer other views.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am surprised at how long it took for me to be angry. Or to know I have always been angry. To outline this anger into the form into the pier glass." (67)

The writing of the book discovers itself within the text, screams what it is to have a body, and explores the myth of Helen of Troy as a way to push through, becoming, through naming trauma, of what is safety or not. Wowowowow.

“We disagree with ourselves and choke on the institution. I run and I am stunned at how my body has created an emergency in me.” (35)

[Kate Gaskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen or My Hunger is a brilliant lyrical excavation of women as objects, myths, and muses. Thompson's book-length poem examines the historical precedent of Helen--who has always been more symbol than actual human woman--and how that precedent shapes the way we see and are seen as women today. This is such a smart book, both challenging and devastating in its wit and clear-eyed observations.

[Kelly Grace Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a haunting read on beauty and how it destroys. The pressures of feminity and all its performance. Such exquisite language.

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through some miracle of coincidence, I found myself lying on my back at Dead Horse Point, looking up at a cacophony of stars, while Gale Marie Thompson rattled off constellations and an unfathomable drop off of darkness loomed below. For 24 hours in the Utah desert, Gale and I marveled about geology and stars. Almost a year later, her collection, Helen or My Hunger, came out from Yes Yes Books in the midst of a global pandemic, and Gale once again provided a companionship I didn’t know I desperately needed while perched above something enormous, dark, and dangerous.

In Helen or My Hunger, Helen of Troy is both a doubling of Thompson and a representative of the feminine. Helen is an eidolon, “an ancient Greek word meaning: a representation of the form of an object; a phantom, or a look-alike of the human form,” who, as an idealized feminine, both haunts and heals the author. Thompson addresses Helen intimately and from a distance, allows her to become a double of the self: “Perhaps I would like to have more than one body, this one too dismantled. Too carnivorous. Mistaking morning for salvage.” Thompson prefers H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, in which Helen is independent and searching for personal truth over the traditional male representations of her as temptress, destroyer, although Thompson’s Helen and narrator both know well destruction, anger. Here, Helen is many women: the historic feminine, the self’s relationship with the body, aunt Helen, “mothers a mother again.” One could read this collection as a palinode, a correction of the harming narratives about the female body, both the cultural/historical and the personal. Thompson approaches disorder (eating disorder and self-harm) obliquely—“I skin and skim myself”—and explores its cultural and historical origins with a sense of simmering rage, “a stellar female anger.” As she examines her personal history with disorder and the culture that perpetuates such self-harm on women, disorder becomes “Blurred by distance, all violence is milk. Easing away from disorder renders it coherent, but all the more terrifying.” However, writing these poems to Helen is also a process of questioning, challenging, demanding.

Thompson’s text somehow manages to structurally be epic long poem and Sapphic fragments, as Thompson follows a narrative arc of searching within a fragmented style that includes the lyric in lineated and prose poems and essay (with origins of “to try”). She often refers to her own process of writing, allowing for mess, instability, and struggle, without clean explanations, often providing an image of herself struggling with words, trying to find the language, to come to terms with womanhood: “And I and what is a woman, and I keep / repeating this question…How can a body make so many mistakes.” Ultimately, Thompson finds a voice in anger and hunger: “What I am trying to say is: this book is a process of learning to speak again, of continuing to practice the problem. Of leaning into devotion when it is bleak.”

Originally published in Kenyon Review, "Poets on Poets"
https://kenyonreview.org/2020/04/poet...