Fates: The Medea Notebooks; Starfish Wash-up; and overflow of an unknown self

For our fourth Tribus, we present Fates, in which three poets―Ann Pedone, Katherine Soniat, and D.M. Spitzer―weave destinies by reimagining stories from the past. The books of Fates resist retellings. Instead, they reopen stories we have been carrying with us. They explore the limits and possibilities of form, testing the poetic line. And they invite new voices to disturb the universe. Ann Pedone’s The Medea Notebooks reimagines and reworks the ancient Greek story as three “Medeas”: the character from the Euripides play, the 20th century opera singer Maria Callas (who played Medea on stage and in film), and the poet herself. In these lyric portrayals of marriage and murder, sex and infidelity, the book explores and complicates our understanding of love, female sexual desire, and betrayal. Katherine Soniat’s ekphrastic collection Starfish Wash-up also claims a myth as its starting point―here in the form of a painting of Telemachus kneeling by the Aegean seashore―and along with that archetypal Lost Son and so many modern-day children, we search the horizon for our missing parent, a search that expands to include the wreckage of, and loss of, the very planet that offered us our first home. In its queering translation of an Old Testament text from the Septuagint, D. M. Spitzer’s overflow of an unknown self: a song of songs performs an act of interpretive violence, shattering the heteronormative version of the Song and arraying its shards into eight cantos of trans-moments that ask us whose love, which lovers, the Song celebrates, while transfiguring the Song’s full-throated praise of embodied, human love.

Ann Pedone is the author of the chapbooks The Bird Happened (Leave Books), perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho. (Cup and Dagger Press), DREAM/WORK, and Everywhere You Put Your Mouth (Halas Press.) Her work has appeared in numerous journals including American Journal of Poetry, Narrative Magazine, Juked, Carve Magazine, Abralemin, JuxtaProse, and Menacing Hedge. Ann has a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Bard College, and a Master’s in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. 

Katherine Soniat’s life has moved around a lot in the last few years: trying hard to find the RIGHT HOME, and why not be most concerned about our planet EARTH? Starfish Washup will be her ninth collection of poetry, to be published in Spring, 2023. The Swing Girl (LSU Press, 2011), Bright Stranger (LSU Press). Polishing the Glass Storm will be available through Louisiana State University Press in fall, 2022. The Goodbye Animals won the Turtle Island Chapbook Award (2014). She has been on the faculty at Hollins University and Virginia Tech, and has taught in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC/Asheville. Her poetry has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Poetry, Iowa Review, The Nation, Women's Review of Books, and Superstition Review, among others. 

D. M. Spitzer is author of A Heaven Wrought of Iron: Poems from the Odyssey (Etruscan 2016), abyss of departures, an image|text collaboration with digital artist SaraShiva Spitzer (Hawai’i Review, 2020), and editor of the volume Philosophy’s Treason: Studies in Philosophy and Translation (Vernon Press, 2020). Spitzer’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Research in Phenomenology, Epoché, Diacritics, Ancient Philosophy, Mosaic, and Translation Review, while his poetry and translations have been published in Ancient Exchanges, The Maine Review, North American Review, TRANSverse, and elsewhere. Currently, Dr. Spitzer is co-editing a volume in Translation Studies and editing another collection of essays on ancient Greek philosophy (both under contract with Routledge). In addition, Spitzer is writing a book on the ways migration and trauma shaped the thinking of the earliest Greek philosophers, as well as working on a translation of only the similes from the ancient Greek epic The Iliad.