This book reimagines myth, loss, and redemption through the contemporary female experience. In ""Persephone in America"", Alison Townsend deftly weaves autobiography with myth in this reinvention of the tale of Demeter and Persephone as seen from the modern woman's perspective. Fraught with emotional honesty, this captivating collection of lyrical and narrative poems chronicles the struggles of the figurative Persephone in three parts - the abduction, descent to the underworld, and return. Townsend turns a shrewd eye to her own experiences, as well as to the lives of other women, to offer an unflinching yet deeply compassionate exploration of such themes as girlhood and the vulnerability of the motherless; the demons of depression, addiction, and abuse; as well as passion, aging, and celebration of the natural world. Although the poems traverse dark emotional territory at times, the picture that emerges ultimately is one of reyelation and wisdom. ""Persephone in America"" is above all a journey of the soul, following the narrator as she explores what it means to be a woman in America, at times descending into darkness, only to emerge into redemption and realize 'time's sweet and invincible secret - that everything repeats - and we watch it.' Townsend's candid portrait of female loss and discovery seeks to illuminate the truths inherent in myth, and the awakenings that hide in our darkest moments. ""Finding Hell on the Map"" - It is easy to imagine hell in the wrong place, human to want to make it something real or geographical, a landscape we can point to on a map. The San Andreas Fault, the Luray Caverns, or that spot in the Hudson River the Dutch called World's End, because the currents there pull you down in every direction. Who wouldn't want to place it outside the body? Who wouldn't flinch.
About the Author :
Alison Townsend is an associate professor of English and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. She is the author of And Still the Music, What the Body Knows, and The Blue Dress: Poems and Prose Poems.
Review :
"Persephone in America is a magnificent book. Alison Townsend poignantly and sometimes shockingly blends reimagined myth with reinvented autobiography. Persephone, the abducted daughter of a goddess, is a would-be Barbie, a wild one, a flirt, an innocent, a rape victim, a cutter, a bulimic, a young poet, a girl who misses her mother, an artist's model, a girl who loves to dance, a depressive, a married woman who has an abortion, and more. . . . Townsend comes at the ancient archetype from so many angles, all of them glittering with line-by-line, phrase-by-phrase richness and insight. This is what revisionist mythology is all about: the sacred and the demonic still alive in our time."--Alicia Ostriker, author of No Heaven
"Alison Townsend's Persephone in America is a collection of confidence and authority, a book that does not shirk from the difficult agendas it sets for itself. Townsend--both through her striking Persephone series and her quietly affecting autobiographical narratives--seeks to make sense of the difficulties of grace and renewal. Loss and mourning haunt these poems, but they also arrive at the long perspectives which can attend our middle years. James Wright famously sought to write 'the poems of a grown man.' Townsend's poems are surely--and in places triumphantly--the poems of a grown woman. This book is a very fine achievement indeed."--David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004
"By constructing a new mythos about America's life and soul, Alison Townsend portrays a renewal so abundant it becomes harder to renounce than embrace. Here, even the steps of a mini-skirted girl in a shopping mall resonate with 'the great and ordinary mystery of being mortal.' These poems are expansive yet tightly focused; unsentimental yet verdant.
They make you want to live the mystery."--Sue William Silverman, author of Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
"Through the lens-metaphor of Persephone's story, Alison Townsend illuminates the passages, descents, losses and insights hard-won by herself and also by young women she has mentored, women who have made descents of their own into underworlds offered up by contemporary culture. Her poems are generous in their candor and compassion, stunningly written, fierce, and consoling."--Leslie Ullman, author of Slow Work through Sand
