Rachel Zucker

The story of Persephone is retold in this collection of poems. Instead of being kidnapped and dragged down the underworld by Hades, Persephone makes the conscious choice to make the journey, a kind of coming of age rebellion, as a daughter goes forth to claim and shape her own life as a woman and as Queen of the underworld.

Each poem is a snippet from a diary or note and letter in deceptively simple lines, revealing the struggle when a mother tried to possess her daughter, the sensual show more mysteries of falling in love, and the eerie beauty of the underworld. show less

I expected to love this, but I didn't. Partly I think because confessional poetry seems exhausted and the neurotic young-mother voice is wholly unrelatable for me. Also, the student-bashing troubled me - she didn't really have much to say either, so why should she fault her students for her own shortcomings. The more language-poetry ones fell short of surprising. It's all fine, but not as great as I'd expected given the hype.

It seemed like the stand alone poems at the front were all the same poem, which might have been one great poem about adultery and sex and marriage and lust, but instead are several mediocre pseudo-bravely confessional poems about extra-marital desires. And perhaps because I'm not very interested in reflections on motherhood, even though she attempts a distancing from the subject by making the language a bit abstract and strange, I was not compelled by the longer poems either. It all just show more seems a little repetitive. show less

I guess you could file this under "neurotic-hipster-mom-language-poetry." Zucker's voice has undeniable force, and some of these poems are vivid in their emotional violence and disjointed verse. A lot of it, however, feels confessional in the worst sense of the word: rote, self-absorbed, hysterical, and lyrically sloppy. The author's high-strung personality becomes numbing after a while; it's like being verbally assaulted at top speed for an hour straight.