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    Eating in the Underworld
    Eating in the Underworld
    Eating in the Underworld
    Ebook64 pages25 minutes

    Eating in the Underworld

    By Rachel Zucker

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Strousse Award fro Best Group of Poems (2002)

    In Rachel Zucker's re-imagining of the Greek myth, Persephone is a daughter struggling to become a woman. Unlike the classical portrait of a maiden kidnapped by a tyrant, Zucker's Persephone chooses to travel to the Underworld and assume her role as Hades' queen. Caught between worlds—light and dark, innocence and power, a mother's protection and a lover's appeal—Persephone describes the strangeness of the Underworld and the problems of transformation and transgression. The arrangement of Zucker's poems reflects Persephone's travels between the Underworld and the Surface. Both spare and lyrical, they are written as entries in Persephone's diary and as letters between Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. The language—strange, urgent, direct—is pulled and changed as Persephone journeys from one world to another revealing the struggle of unmaking and remaking the self.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateMay 15, 2015
    ISBN9780819576132
    Eating in the Underworld
    Author

    Rachel Zucker

    Rachel Zucker is the author of The Last Clear Narrative, The Bad Wife Handbook and Eating in the Underworld. She is the winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, the Center for Book Arts Award and the Salt Hill Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in many well-known journals including: 3rd Bed, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Epoch, Fence, Iowa Review, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner as well as in the Best American Poetry 2001 anthology.

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    • 5/5
      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 mysteries of falling in love, and the eerie beauty of the underworld.

    Book preview

    Eating in the Underworld - Rachel Zucker

    [ONE]

    here there is no place

    that does not see you …

    RAINER MARIA RILKE

    DIARY [GATHERING FLOWERS]

    If the light were good I could see everything.

    Look through rain, live the even life.

    I, who have been pressed and prettied,

    feel more watched than wandering,

    wonder, does someone expect me?

    Today wind, like water pulling back

    the pebble-layer, wants to sigh, the big stones

    heave and settle. But before the ribs expand

    it pulls again.

    I crave—

    but damn these maidens won’t allow …

    The light is just a likeness,

    (if I could only show them—)

    oh what does the wind want?

    DIARY [ON THE BANKS]

    a light as if pure and white were one word:

    scrito, stepping twice

    am I real alone? alone, alone

    what waves are for

    I cannot afford this sky

    or the sky to move on

    watching the dead go in, the tides come out

    the light might not be the same again

    all the light turns green at once

    go go go go go

    I will

    go, not even knowing

    where

    it seems so

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