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.