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bmwest's review
I understood one poem. I had high hopes but this felt like weird, disjointed words that were supposed to be profound but didn’t work for me.
mjaimezuckerman's review
5.0
Through some miracle of coincidence, I found myself lying on my back at Dead Horse Point, looking up at a cacophony of stars, while Gale Marie Thompson rattled off constellations and an unfathomable drop off of darkness loomed below. For 24 hours in the Utah desert, Gale and I marveled about geology and stars. Almost a year later, her collection, Helen or My Hunger, came out from Yes Yes Books in the midst of a global pandemic, and Gale once again provided a companionship I didn’t know I desperately needed while perched above something enormous, dark, and dangerous.
In Helen or My Hunger, Helen of Troy is both a doubling of Thompson and a representative of the feminine. Helen is an eidolon, “an ancient Greek word meaning: a representation of the form of an object; a phantom, or a look-alike of the human form,” who, as an idealized feminine, both haunts and heals the author. Thompson addresses Helen intimately and from a distance, allows her to become a double of the self: “Perhaps I would like to have more than one body, this one too dismantled. Too carnivorous. Mistaking morning for salvage.” Thompson prefers H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, in which Helen is independent and searching for personal truth over the traditional male representations of her as temptress, destroyer, although Thompson’s Helen and narrator both know well destruction, anger. Here, Helen is many women: the historic feminine, the self’s relationship with the body, aunt Helen, “mothers a mother again.” One could read this collection as a palinode, a correction of the harming narratives about the female body, both the cultural/historical and the personal. Thompson approaches disorder (eating disorder and self-harm) obliquely—“I skin and skim myself”—and explores its cultural and historical origins with a sense of simmering rage, “a stellar female anger.” As she examines her personal history with disorder and the culture that perpetuates such self-harm on women, disorder becomes “Blurred by distance, all violence is milk. Easing away from disorder renders it coherent, but all the more terrifying.” However, writing these poems to Helen is also a process of questioning, challenging, demanding.
Thompson’s text somehow manages to structurally be epic long poem and Sapphic fragments, as Thompson follows a narrative arc of searching within a fragmented style that includes the lyric in lineated and prose poems and essay (with origins of “to try”). She often refers to her own process of writing, allowing for mess, instability, and struggle, without clean explanations, often providing an image of herself struggling with words, trying to find the language, to come to terms with womanhood: “And I and what is a woman, and I keep / repeating this question…How can a body make so many mistakes.” Ultimately, Thompson finds a voice in anger and hunger: “What I am trying to say is: this book is a process of learning to speak again, of continuing to practice the problem. Of leaning into devotion when it is bleak.”
Originally published in Kenyon Review, "Poets on Poets"
https://kenyonreview.org/2020/04/poets-on-poets-celebrating-new-collections-part-4/
In Helen or My Hunger, Helen of Troy is both a doubling of Thompson and a representative of the feminine. Helen is an eidolon, “an ancient Greek word meaning: a representation of the form of an object; a phantom, or a look-alike of the human form,” who, as an idealized feminine, both haunts and heals the author. Thompson addresses Helen intimately and from a distance, allows her to become a double of the self: “Perhaps I would like to have more than one body, this one too dismantled. Too carnivorous. Mistaking morning for salvage.” Thompson prefers H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, in which Helen is independent and searching for personal truth over the traditional male representations of her as temptress, destroyer, although Thompson’s Helen and narrator both know well destruction, anger. Here, Helen is many women: the historic feminine, the self’s relationship with the body, aunt Helen, “mothers a mother again.” One could read this collection as a palinode, a correction of the harming narratives about the female body, both the cultural/historical and the personal. Thompson approaches disorder (eating disorder and self-harm) obliquely—“I skin and skim myself”—and explores its cultural and historical origins with a sense of simmering rage, “a stellar female anger.” As she examines her personal history with disorder and the culture that perpetuates such self-harm on women, disorder becomes “Blurred by distance, all violence is milk. Easing away from disorder renders it coherent, but all the more terrifying.” However, writing these poems to Helen is also a process of questioning, challenging, demanding.
Thompson’s text somehow manages to structurally be epic long poem and Sapphic fragments, as Thompson follows a narrative arc of searching within a fragmented style that includes the lyric in lineated and prose poems and essay (with origins of “to try”). She often refers to her own process of writing, allowing for mess, instability, and struggle, without clean explanations, often providing an image of herself struggling with words, trying to find the language, to come to terms with womanhood: “And I and what is a woman, and I keep / repeating this question…How can a body make so many mistakes.” Ultimately, Thompson finds a voice in anger and hunger: “What I am trying to say is: this book is a process of learning to speak again, of continuing to practice the problem. Of leaning into devotion when it is bleak.”
Originally published in Kenyon Review, "Poets on Poets"
https://kenyonreview.org/2020/04/poets-on-poets-celebrating-new-collections-part-4/
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