“if you didn’t limp
your way home, dark house, door sealed tight,
all the street with eyes sewn shut,
i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent.
i want you listening to me.”
— Maria Zoccola, “helen of troy feuds with the neighborhood”
Maria Zoccola ignored her homework in the fifth grade and instead spent her time in study hall writing stories about dragons, she confesses over the phone. Her literary-themed youthful rebellion extended beyond the doors of the classroom. She snuck books into her brother’s sports games, and it’s a good thing she did, or readers might never have had the chance to become immersed in her debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner), due on Tuesday, January 14, 2025.
photograph by morgan lyttle
Maria Zoccola
Though her upcoming release is Zoccola’s first collection, writing and the arts have been major facets of her career for as long as she has had a career. Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, with writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has worked as a freelance journalist for the Daily News in Memphis, and she ran a nonprofit program in Savannah, Georgia — the Deep Center’s Young Author Project, which facilitates creative writing workshops for young authors.
Or, as she succinctly puts it, “Whenever I can be around arts, reading, language — that feeds my soul in a way other things simply don’t.”
Once such example of soulful nourishment is ancient mythology. “I have been a Greek mythology nerd ever since I was very little,” Zoccola says with a laugh. “Nobody ever watched or restricted what I read, even when they maybe should have.”
Suffice it to say that Zoccola was primed to be an immediate enthusiast when she read Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad while attending St. Mary’s Episcopal School. Homer’s 8th century BC epic poem resonated with the young Memphian. “I read the whole thing cover to cover,” she admits. She still takes her copy with her wherever she goes, even sacrificing precious suitcase space when she studied abroad in England. Yes, the same copy she read in ninth grade.
Zoccola’s poetry collection crackles with undeniable energy, as though Helen is alive inside, rattling the bars of her cell and probing for weak spots. The clock is ticking, and Helen will explode into the world soon enough.
Homer’s poems have remained a source of comfort and creative inspiration for Zoccola. She was experimenting with “persona” poems — one in which the writer adopts the voice and perspective of another character — and wrote several in the voices of the women of the Iliad. Except she didn’t work with Helen. She found Helen to be a bit too frustrating. “In the Iliad, Helen has no choices,” Zoccola says.
Indeed, Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, is known more for her relationships with the men in her life. Her husband, King Menelaus, goes to war with Troy after Paris abducts Helen. In the Iliad, she is more MacGuffin than a character with agency. Or so Zoccola initially thought.
The poet was reeling from a series of life’s big moments — she had just moved back to Memphis and bought a house — when a sudden epiphany illuminated Helen in a new light.
“I dove for my notebook and wrote seven Helen poems in a row,” Zoccola remembers. “The voice that emerged was not this Bronze Age Greek woman but was instead this modern voice, this woman who sounded really familiar to me.”
In viewing Helen through a contemporary lens, as the most beautiful young woman in Sparta, Tennessee, circa 1993, Zoccola felt a new connection with the character. “She was just as much a product of her circumstances and trapped by the narrative as any of the other women around her,” the author says. That simple act of reframing led to others, such as viewing Helen’s abduction as an elopement. In framing the event as an affair, Zoccola restores Helen’s agency — while allowing her the dignity of making a bad decision and then choosing how to live with it. Some classicists might call this collection revisionist history, but Zoccola’s work is transformative, and she has a whip-smart, fearless voice to back up the structural fireworks.
In “helen of troy folds laundry in a dim room,” the heroine wonders if the reader has ever “started growing away from yourself,” like a sun-beaten shuck of corn “bending toward the harvester, leaning forward in relief.” The imagery is incredibly evocative of Helen’s exhaustion, and in tying Helen’s weariness to a scene of harvest, Zoccola deftly juggles an emotional, personal reading of the moment while evoking a fertility symbol — and simultaneously conjuring a Bronze Age-era association of woman-mother-harvest.
The collection is rife with similar multilayered examples of the author’s dexterity. In “another thing about the affair,” repeated mentions of dead fish seem to reference William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, while doing the more important work of illustrating the mundane reality of marriage.
Though ostensibly a 1990s retelling of Homer’s Iliad, Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993, is its own delightfully strange, multilayered, and explosive creation. There are slight shades of Maria Dahvana Headley’s excellent 2020 translation of Beowulf, but the comparisons are skin-deep at most, the effect of two brilliant poets irreverently hijacking ancient verse in order to breathe new vitality into them.
Zoccola’s poetry collection crackles with undeniable energy, as though Helen is alive inside, rattling the bars of her cell and probing for weak spots. The clock is ticking, and Helen will explode into the world soon enough.
“It means the world to me to have this book come out in Memphis. I’m a Memphian; my family’s been here for generations,” Zoccola says. “To have this book, which is set in small-town Tennessee, come out in Tennessee is incredible.
“Everyone is invited to the book release party at Novel,” she laughs. “There will be cake.”
Maria Zoccola’s debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993, releases January 14th at 6 p.m. with a celebration at Novel bookstore.
