Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems

by Maria Zoccola

Overview

*A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick*

“By turns hilarious and provocative, it’s an affecting character study and modern mythic retelling.” —Publishers Weekly, Books That Should Be on Your Radar in 2025

Part myth retelling, part character study, this sharp, visceral debut poetry collection reimagines Helen of Troy from Homer’s Iliad as a disgruntled housewife in 1990s Tennessee.

In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying gone...

Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the reader: “if you never owned a bone-sharp biography... / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.”

Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668046333
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	92,679
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/16/2024

In Zoccola’s exceptional debut, The Iliad’s Helen of Troy is reimagined as a wistful Tennessee housewife, dissatisfied with her marriage and wasted potential and reliving the glory days of her youth. If the premise sounds contrived, the execution delivers something unexpectedly magical. Helen’s life is far from stereotypically bereft, as evidenced in the hilariously histrionic “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly”: “the pig is the place where all desire/ is consummated, each want made fat, made starch, made bone-in-flesh... sing, muse, of the manager’s special, two-for-one on yogurt cups,/ little debbies leaping for the cart.” The narrative through line involves Helen having an affair but ultimately returning to her husband (whom she refers to throughout as “the big cheese”) and daughter. She speaks in the aftermath of the affair of wanting more for her child than she has had: “gods of birds// who speak in human voices, i do not want to watch/ her walk through a life of small mercies and small choices./ I want each tooth spit up clean and delivered to her palm/ to plant as she chooses.” Zoccola provides a winning combination of humor and enough pathos to make Homer proud. Accessible yet deep, this will be adored by seasoned poetry fans and casual readers alike. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"This exuberant début poetry collection recasts the titular heroine as an Appalachian housewife reckoning with the tyrannies of beauty, domesticity, and small-town gossip during the late twentieth century. Zoccola’s Helen is neither femme fatale nor damsel in distress; here, the 'face that launched a thousand ships' belies a person with a teeming, tenacious mind and implacable appetites. . . . Defiant, Helen sings of her rage against 'a life of small mercies and small choices,' illuminating the perennial struggle between a unique yet universal woman and the world that would confine her." —The New Yorker

"Zoccola has beautifully and resourcefully reimagined this mythic material and relocated it to Sparta, Tenn. . . . By doing so she has provided a witty and acute anatomy of small-town life and of our own American cultural and spiritual barrenness . . . What Zoccola achieves, while intermittently comic, is in fact quite searching in its explorations of a young Southern housewife. . . . Zoccola’s Helen has succeeded in joining her mythic forebear." —New York Times

"[A] raised fist of a debut . . . a collection as unruly as it is beautiful." —Four Way Review

"Wholly original . . . Zoccola’s Helen, resurrected in peacetime Tennessee, demands an audience for all 'the ugliest and most beautiful parts' of her epic, and in the telling, she finds her voice. . . . By making a new poem out of these traditional lines, Zoccola remakes Helen: a new woman who thrives in spite of neglect." —Los Angeles Review of Books

"By transferring the basic outlines of Helen’s story to small-town Tennessee, Zoccola’s book plays up the mythic dimensions of grubby chain-store Americana and the mundane, complicated humanity of Greek myth. It’s sharp and a lot of fun." —New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

"Employ[s] a mastery of language . . . The way Zoccola plays with form and engages with foundational texts such as Robert Fagle’s translation of The Iliad are what make the book electric. . . . rich, funny, and inventive." —Indianapolis Review

"A cheeky but smart reimagining." —Poetry Northwest

"Helen of Troy, 1993 masterfully transports Homer’s larger-than-life tale into small town Tennessee in the 90s . . . a darkly immersive exploration of one woman’s life and psyche. . . . In inviting us to consider a classic through a modern and incisive lens, Zoccola crafts a stunning debut that will leave you hungering for more." —Southern Review of Books

"By turns hilarious and provocative, it's an affecting character study and modern mythic retelling." —Maya C. Popa, Publishers Weekly's "8 Books That Should Be On Your Radar in 2025"

"Mesmerizing . . . Zoccola merges the mythological and the modern, working a literary alchemy that erupts again and again into startling observation and formal surprise. . . . spellbinding . . . Zoccola’s confident, nuanced use of persona creates a voice that thrums with knowing urgency and fresh observation. She imbues her modern small-town Helen with a resonant sense of timelessness, and the result is an exhilarating debut." —Chapter 16

"[A] slick, stylish collection. . . . An undercurrent of ’90s Americana combines with Helen’s epic journey to create this wholly original and hotly anticipated work of narrative poetry." —Electric Literature

"Exceptional . . . Zoccola provides a winning combination of humor and enough pathos to make Homer proud. Accessible yet deep, this will be adored by seasoned poetry fans and casual readers alike." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Zoccola illuminates the mythic inherent in the everyday . . . [her] work is transformative, and she has a whip-smart, fearless voice . . . Helen of Troy, 1993 is [a] delightfully strange, multilayered, and explosive creation . . . Zoccola's poetry collection crackles with undeniable energy, as though Helen is alive inside, rattling the bars of her cell." —Memphis Magazine

"Breathtaking . . . transformative . . . Zoccola wastes not a single word or punctuation mark, commanding the line as well as Helen does her story. With craft and voice worthy of literary obsession, these poems will pierce right through you. . . . A fierce reimagining of this long-misunderstood figure of mythology." —Only Poems

"Zoccola’s text weaves Homeric myth with the objects, rituals, and landmarks of 90s Americana that ground her protagonist in a setting that is as unexpected as it is uncannily familiar. The narrative that emerges from this collection of poetry challenges traditional notions about Helen’s character and opens up new avenues for reenvisioning the legendary women of Homeric epic." —MInor Literatures

"From the first page, you become enraptured in a world that is forever being turned on its head. . . . The poems, as fiery and inescapable as Helen herself on the cover, stay with you long after they’ve been read." —Write or Die

“Sinking into Helen of Troy, 1993 felt like the magic of finding a kindred spirit on the stool next to me in a dive bar. Zoccola’s poems kept me saying, ‘Yes, yes exactly.’ In her rendering of the rural South, she takes things I have felt only indistinctly and delivers them to me with sharp and beautiful and brutal clarity.” —Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas

"[I read] it in one sitting and was moved by the creativity and the modern take on an all-time classic. The moment I finished it, I knew it was going to be a favorite book for a long, long time." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful's Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2025

"Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993 brings Helen to life in the twentieth-century American South—Sparta, Tennessee, where she shops at Piggly Wiggly, calls her sister Clytemnestra on the phone (“cly, you remember when it was us and the boys...”), and lists her pregnancy cravings (“pickles. peanut butter off a spoon. that cereal / with the little blue guys on it”). Zoccola’s use of persona and anachronism are transformative, and the formal daring of these poems, including golden shovels from the Iliad, thrilled me. Helen of Troy, 1993 is the most imaginative debut I’ve read in years." —Maggie Smith, poet and New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“'The woman, was she / beautiful? It hardly mattered. She’d already turned away,' writes Maria Zoccola in her debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993. It’s thrilling to encounter Helen, a woman villainized and/or victimized in countless Trojan war retellings, in this new light—the sickly neon of the ‘90s, where affairs begin on the internet and end in a Perkins restaurant. In Zoccola’s retelling, Helen has agency—leaving and returning of her own volition. Sometimes, Helen decides to exit the confines of the poem itself—'where is helen? i don’t know, or else i would tell you.' This collection is, like the traditional epic poem, sonically beautiful. It demands to be read aloud. It demands to be read again and again." —Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck

"There is a gracious plenty of grittiness and threat in Maria Zoccola’s poems, but the poetry’s verbal vitality, coupled with the novelistic satisfaction of the narrator’s epic-worthy story, achieves the heightened pain and pleasure of the sublime. I cannot foresee a better book of American poetry published this year." —Ron Rash, award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Serena and Poems: New and Selected

From the Publisher