Another Troy

Another Troy features the recently discovered poetry of an American teenager, Joan Wehlen Morrison. We witness how she matures as a poet and historian from 1938-1944. Joan's poetry tells a unique - and true - story as she loses her innocence due to the impending war and its violent arrival. Along the way she dates a number of boys, reflects on politics and art, and ends up falling in love with the man who would become her husband. Offering us more than mere historical color, in her verse Joan muses on literature, nature, God, the meaning of life, romance, history, and World War II. This vivid account of a real American girl's lived experiences during the Great Depression and the start of World War II provides vital access to how poetry becomes a conduit for understanding historical events as they happen. In her papers found after her death--diaries, notebooks, and the jewels of the collection, her poetry--Joan's perspective demonstrates how, despite an underprivileged background financially, she managed to thrive surrounded by books, socialist political leanings, and artistic talk. Inspired by the literature she read, the young Joan writes verse in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling. Later her favorite poets are A. E. Housman, John Donne, and Shakespeare. The title of this volume comes from Joan's passion for classical literature and the connections she makes between her present moment and those of antiquity. She remains a girl, able to make fun of herself, despite an ability to see deeply into things. Classical literature gives her sustenance in the darkest days of World War II. And Joan never loses her ability to feel compassion, even for the so-called enemy. These poems, sent as it were, in a time capsule to our moment today, remind us how the written word remains a means for hope for those in emotional extremity--from passionate love to dire political circumstances--both in terms of what one can read and what one can write.

About the Author :
Joan Wehlen Morrison (1922-2010) was born in Chicago to a Swedish immigrant father and a mother of Ukrainian-Jewish heritage. Poor and working class, Joan received a scholarship to study at the University of Chicago. A resident of Morristown, NJ, Joan was the co-author of American Mosaic: The Immigrant Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It (1980), recognized as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Dramatic readings from the book have been performed on Ellis Island, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and in an "In Performance at the White House" program broadcast nationally on PBS. Her second book, From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It (1987), became the basis for her popular course on the 1960s at the New School in New York City. Joan's wartime diaries have been published as Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America (2013). Susan Signe Morrison, professor of medieval English literature at Texas State University, is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and four books on the Middle Ages: Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance; Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics; The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter; and A Medieval Woman's Companion: Women's Lives in the European Middle Ages. Author of the novel Grendel's Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife, Susan edited Joan Wehlen Morrison's diaries as Home Front Girl. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Review :
With growing solicitude at the coming of the Second World War, teenager Joan Wehlen Morrison struggled in her poems to understand the enormous realities of her time while also learning about love and romance, the passage of time, maturity--topics common to most of us at such an age, but topics troubled profoundly by the hatred and loss and violence of the 1930s and 40s. Reading these poems is remembering with nostalgia what it means to be young and setting out. Sadly, they also echo the deeper question that all of us--young and old alike--are today once again forced to ponder: what is to come of us in a world gone mad? In Another Troy, Morrison aches for answers, for truth, in the way only a teenager can. --Steve Wilson, author of The Reaches Did you ever own a notebook, and did you open it, perhaps at night, to write about the daily happenings of a world whose pace, magnitude, beauty, and violence staggered your imagination? If so, these poems are for you. Joan Wehlen Morrison's Another Troy captures what it feels like to be an emerging political, intellectual, and romantic young woman in wartime--when, as William Carlos Williams famously wrote: "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/ of what is found there." The poems in Another Troy see beauty and brokenness and honor both. "The moon is a bent feather in the sky" in one poem; "there is an empty orchard in Flanders/Rotting in the rain" in another. Tender and aware, these poems cannot help but imagine foreshortened futures, so that when Morrison writes that the "wind was like a boy's breath," we wonder if the boy is at war, and if he will live to see adulthood. In other poems, the poet scrutinizes her own life, imagining "this girl in the blue dress and Juliet cap--/ I will be utterly disappeared." Luckily for us, Morrison's poems have not disappeared, and when she writes, "I am a moving window[, ]" I feel lucky to have been able to glimpse the world through it. --Cecily Parks, author of O'Nights and Field Folly Snow Prepare to be charmed and enthralled by these beautiful, sincere poems full of artistry and verve. Joan Morrison, born in 1922, confronts the realities of war and love in witty and learned verse. "But darling, platonic as I know we are, /I fear, against all reason, I still want to be/Immensely Epicurean with you," she writes. Her work transcends the passing seasons of a nation and a life. --Tina Kelley, author most recently of Rise Wildly and Abloom & Awry (CavanKerry Press)