Victory and Her Opposites

Name: Victory and Her Opposites
SKU: 978-1-932195-37-8
Price: 20.95 USD
Availability: InStock

by Amy England

$20.95

A collage of archeology reports, imagined narrative, and poetic description centered around the excavation of Samothrace’s temple complex to the great gods.

Format: paperback

ISBN: 978-1-932195-37-8 Categories: Amy England, Poetry

Victory and Her Opposites is a collage of archeology reports, imagined narrative, and poetic description centered around the excavation of Samothrace’s temple complex to the great gods. Little knowledge survives of the temple’s rites for the mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone, and after centuries of earthquakes and looting, little of the structures remain standing. The sections of the book all experiment with enacting that fragmentation and loss. The book is also an example of close collaboration between writing and image; the visual artists’ contributions are central to it. In this way, the book extends its exploration of how we interpret what we see, how we feel compelled to fill in what is missing, and how that filling in allows us to renew and reinterpret a burdensome and mysterious past.

Amy England received a B.A. in English from Brandeis University, an M.A. in English and creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Ph.D. in English and creative writing from the University of Denver. Her book of collages, For the Reckless Sleeper, was published by American Letters and Commentary in 2011. Her work has appeared in journals such as TriQuarterly, Fence,McSweeney’s, Field, and Denver Quarterly, and is anthologized in Sites of Insight (University of Colorado Press, edited by James Lough) and Best American Poetry 2001 (Simon and Schuster, edited by Robert Hass). She teaches at the writing program at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Examples of her translations of Japanese poetry, as well as other projects, are available at speedingplanet.net