Photograph by Morgan Lyttle
Maria Zoccola, a queer Southern writer and educator from Memphis, Tennessee, brings the epic to the everyday in her debut collection, Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner, 2025). One of her “Helen” poems was previously featured in The Cream City Review, and Zoccola’s work has earned her Best Small Fictions and Best New Poets nominations, as well as a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Here, Zoccola shows off her knowledge of the Classics while keeping her writing voice approachable, giving her readers a sense of living in a Greek tragedy borne of the late 20th Century.
With a title like Helen of Troy, 1993, it is unsurprising that this is a telling of Homer’s Iliad that we haven’t heard before. In an interview with the Alaska Quarterly Review, Zoccola addresses what she finds to be an “unfair ending” for the Queen of Sparta in the original, having no agency in the events that happen around her. It’s a bit of a paradox in the initial story: if Helen is the driving force behind the events of the Trojan War, why is she not the protagonist? Here, Helen takes center stage. In the town of Sparta, Tennessee, we learn of Helen’s family, their names appropriately disguised or shortened to match Helen’s deadpan, often sarcastic tone; for instance, her husband Menelaus is referred to as “The Big Cheese,” her daughter Hermoine is “The Kid,” and her lover Paris is “The Stranger.” Helen’s voice as we hear about her daily (mis)adventures is biting, sometimes humorous, and yet quietly tragic; while reading, it’s easy to get the feeling that we know this person, or someone just like her.
The storyline of the collection draws inspiration from both Euripides’ tragedy Helen and Homer’s epic Iliad, even building from the original text of the latter—my personal favorite use of the original text includes a golden shovel within “helen of troy avoids her school reunion,” in which the last words of each line spell out the infamous lines: “bitch that I am, vicious, scheming” followed by Zoccola’s own enjambed last words: “horror to freeze the heart” (Iliad translated by Robert Fagles 6.408-409).
Understatement and irony dominate Helen’s narration. Titles like “helen cleans up after the barbecue” and “another thing about the affair” both highlight the mundanity of everyday life and minimize the weight of her experiences; the choices Helen makes are hers, though an air of passivity casts a veil over the events that no doubt run emotions high. This is an interesting detail when read in tandem with how The Big Cheese treats Helen, encouraging her role as a housewife despite her claustrophobia and forbidding her access to the internet to keep her world small. Helen, conversely, pushes back at his attempts as she expresses pity, disappointment, and even hatred toward him. As we follow Helen’s life story, she finds herself married and with a young child. Though Helen possesses some agency in her circumstances, we see how generational poverty, trauma, and societal pressure to do what one is “supposed to” can stand in for fate. Zoccola channels this push and pull against greater forces symbolically with literal winds of change. Helen tells us as she returns on foot to Sparta, after running off with The Stranger, that the wind “scraped away shreds of [herself]/ back to [her], old stretches of skin that fit/ themselves to the holes [she’d] been guarding.” Later, in “helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu,” she gives us these words:
“the world around me/ hunkered under the wrong spread of life,/ and yet i saw that it was living,/ edges softened, blanks filled in—a sphere/ that begged my absence, that collected/ my childhood in its outstretched hands/ and pushed it under the skin of itself,/ hidden and repurposed, folded away,/ breathing gently under combs of wind.”
To provide context and add a layer of strangeness to the story, readers are given two more voices to contrast with Helen’s. For our Greek Chorus, the women of Sparta gossip among themselves. They inform us of such in “the spartan woman discuss the family”: “there are not ways of living. there’s one way/ out of the mud and one way back in, if you’re/ concerned about that sort of thing. we’re not/…we like/ to take attendance, unofficially,/ just a little whisper to share over coffee/ in the church hall”. In more abstract moments, we are also given a narrative from “The Swan.” Following the myth, it is not always clear if The Swan is an actual swan, Zeus in the form he took to impregnate Leda and conceive Helen, or both, or neither. This voice is from a distance—a bird’s-eye view, one might say—and gives a similar feeling of remove Helen senses from the community. An example from “(interlude: the swan describes an invasive species)”: “america killed her trumpeter swans, but she doesn’t love/ us, her mute replacements: so beautiful, so hungry, so vehement in/ defending ourselves. helen, i see you. hatched from an egg, paddling/ ever since. born in a land that doubts your claim to it.”
Zoccola shows the big and small ways in which Helen’s life unravels in her retelling, with the authenticity of her voice as a Southern writer imbued with the mystical quality of early Classical Antiquity. Her empathy for her characters cuts through their cynicism and mystery, giving readers a modern, human portrait of larger-than-life literary figures.
Helen of Troy, 1993 is published by Scribner Poetry and distributed through Simon & Schuster. Purchase information can be found here.
Bios:
Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University and has spent several years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Maria’s work has previously appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Helen of Troy, 1993 is her debut poetry collection.
Allie Farrell is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, studying English with an emphasis in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies. She focuses on hauntings, history, and how the two intertwine. Allie is an Assistant Editor at The Cream City Review.
