Erou
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Maya Phillips’ stunning debut collection Erou borrows the framework of the traditional Greek epic to interrogate the inner workings of a present-day nuclear family and the role of a patriarch whose life, marriage, and death are imagined as a sort of hero’s journey. Her poems move seamlessly between the worlds of the living and the dead, between myth and reality in a journey that raises its own Homeric question: What is home and how do we locate our place within that home? These are poems of passion and compassion in their reconciliation with what cannot be changed—but can be understood—by those who have been left behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Phillips's scintillating debut, domestic turmoil is transformed into Greek mythology as fate and bloodline frame the legend of her life's tragic hero: her dead father. Here renamed "Erou," this character is a vortex of dark matter, a "silver-tongued" tempest of deceit and hedonism with a "smile sharp enough to wear even a diamond down to dust." With macabre precision, Phillips describes his phantom as "the appetite that outlives him... (one that) eats// himself out of the grave, dines on the neighborhood,/ chews our house down to its bones." Although permeated with ambivalence, Erou's redemption prevails as Phillips acknowledges that he no longer has the opportunity to absolve himself, and that his heart, at its core, was heroic: "The hero dies because there is nothing else/ left to do.//... The hero dies because it is nobler to do so./ The hero dies because it is safer to do so./ The hero dies so we understand he is the hero./ The hero dies so he understands he is the hero." Executed as a modern epic poem that blends urban decadence with transcendental pathos, Phillips eviscerates the idea of pedestrian exchanges. This impressive work invites a discourse that redefines the depths of desperation, forgiveness, and acceptance.
