The Scattered Papers of Penelope

I wasn't weaving, I wasn't knitting

 

I was writing something

 

erasing and being erased

 

under the weight of the word

 

—from "Penelope Says"

 

Drawn from the traditions of Greek myth, history, and art, The Scattered Papers of Penelope is poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's first full retrospective collection available in English. Translated from the Greek by an array of noted scholars, including the editor Karen Van Dyck, Anghelaki-Rooke's poetry is bold, sensual, and brash. She re-examines Greek history and myth through the female body—the bodies of Penelope and Helen and the poet's own body, scarred by illness. Other poems and sequences take the form of a journal kept during the first Gulf War, prose poems about modern violence and dictatorship, and lyric descriptions of the domestic world on the poet's home island of Aegina.

 

The Scattered Papers of Penelope introduces to American readers a major global poetic voice, a winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy's Poetry Prize.