Helen Or My Hunger

<p><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Helen or My Hunger</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is a looping serial sequence that explores the relationship between memory language the body and power. In dialogue with H.D.'s 1961 epic </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Helen in Egypt </em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>these poems address the </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>eidolon </em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>of Helen of Troy: the echo of an echo. They question notions of beauty and the body by communicating with this absence sustaining this unsustainable dialogue. Ghost? Icon? Mother? Friend? These poems address the ruptures of trauma violence with mythology and lineage with the inevitable failings of gender and the body.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The core of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Helen or My Hunger </em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>contains and at the same time rejects-tries to distract itself from-the material of the writer's life and body. These poems reckon with hunger desire and shame and with the violence of language and representation (body as icon as seat of trauma). </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Helen or My Hunger </em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>asks: how can we live in a world where both private and public pain resist language? How can we mark differences but also make visible the samenesses? What violence do we sanction through language through narrative through form? In a sequence that resists its own formation </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Helen or My Hunger </em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>wonders how to live in a world that seeks to reduce to wound what it cannot contain.</span></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>