Category: Issue 01

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, by Anne Carson

Maria Zoccola

I’m a little bit obsessed with Helen of Troy. This is not news to anyone who knows me, or in fact to anyone who happens to have seen me on any social media platform created by man or machine in the past few years. My lifelong interest in mythology recently culminated in a poetry collection I published with Scribner in early 2025, a book called Helen of Troy, 1993. The collection reimagines the Homeric Helen as a dissatisfied housewife in small-town Tennessee in the early nineties, blending myth and modernity through persona poems that pay homage to both the Iliad and Chuck E. Cheese. Embarking on this project meant indulging my fixation on Helen of Troy far beyond the poems I was writing myself: I sought Helen out in television shows, comic books, stage plays, advertisements. I tracked her through mythology and scholarship. And, too, I hunted down other poets and writers who were engaging with Helen through inspiration and adaptation, calling her down from whatever afterlife she might currently be inhabiting to serve as muse for creative projects large and small.

I’d already been saving one particular Helen work to read after I’d finished my own collection, as a kind of reward for my perseverance: Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a version of Euripides’s play Helen by the great Anne Carson. I’m personally something of a Carson mega-fan. I’ve inhaled her work across poetry and translation and stage adaptation—to me, Carson represents the very best of what a lifelong engagement with the Classics and a rigorous commitment to a creative life can produce. She turns a phrase on the blade of a knife. Her images become weapons, her characters small ticking bombs. “A heart surgeon told me once, / no need to worry: once the cutting starts, / a wound / shines by its own light,” her play announces. Carson’s version of the Euripides is under sixty pages, and yet I knew it would unzip the back of my skull.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a mashup of the end of the Trojan War and 1950s Hollywood, and the spotlight is trained directly on its single suffering speaker. Norma Jeane Baker (the real name, and realer persona, of Marilyn Monroe) is staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles to work on a film with the director Fritz Lang. Her residence in the hotel does not seem quite voluntary; she is not free to come and go or to see her family—or rather, Helen of Troy’s family, daughter Hermione and husband Menelaus. Moviemaking takes a long time, and as a consequence, Norma Jeane has been shut up in the Chateau Marmont for over ten years. To keep him from interfering, her husband has been informed that Norma Jeane has instead been kidnapped and taken to Troy. Menelaus has spent the intervening decade fighting the Trojans for Norma Jeane’s release, a project of double utility, as it has kept him occupied and allowed MGM to invest heavily in the film rights to the war. Alas, Menelaus has recently discovered that Norma Jeane hasn’t been in Troy at all: instead, a magical cloud in the shape of a woman formed a very convincing body double, a cloud that dissipated once returned to Los Angeles. Norma Jeane’s troubles, therefore, are many: placate her deceived husband, worry about her absent and pill-swallowing daughter, and find a way to escape Fritz Lang and the Chateau Marmont.

While Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is not a scene-for-scene retelling of the Euripides, it grows directly from the rich soil of the original plot. In Euripides’s Helen, an eidolon goes to Troy in Helen’s place while Helen waits out the war in Egypt, where King Theoclymenos is now angling for her hand. When Menelaus shows up at the war’s end, the two plot to sail back to Sparta right under the king’s nose. By recasting Helen of Troy as Marilyn Monroe, Carson yokes together two women so weighed down by their respective symbolisms that the resulting mouthpiece seems to pulse on the page, her speeches echoing across centuries and geographies with a terrifying resonance. Helen and Norma Jeane are twin figureheads of the fetishized feminine, women who have “the same power—to stick in the throat of Desire,” as Anne Carson said in a rare interview for LitHub. In Carson’s play, Helen/Marilyn/Norma Jeane is trapped, deprived of agency and humanity, her name and fame a shell inside which the real woman curls unseen. “She’s just a bit of grit caught in the world’s need for transcendence,” remarks the play’s chorus character, who is in fact Norma Jeane in the guise of Truman Capote. In the Euripides, Helen’s eventual escape from Egypt points her to a bright and honorable future; her piety and faithfulness to Menelaus have earned her a happy ending. In Carson’s play, Norma Jeane’s escape may bring a change of physical circumstance, but there can be no freedom from the objectification Helen/Marilyn/Norma Jeane represents:

Rape
is the story of Helen,
Persephone,
Norma Jeane,
Troy.
War is the context,
and God is a boy.
Oh my darlings,
they tell you you’re born with a precious pearl.
Truth is,
it’s a disaster to be a girl.

Carson intersperses the scenes of her play with linguistic meditations on relevant Greek words, such as άρπάξειν, “to take,” which Carson traces through the Latin (rapio) and into the English (rape). The conclusion: “Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.” Norma Jeane Baker of Troy refuses to cover its eyes, however. Its speaker stares down the audience, daring us to look away, we who are complicit in the appetites consuming Helen/Marilyn/Norma Jeane down to nothing, who are here, in the end, still to take from her. To me, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is an Anne Carson masterpiece, original and sobering, a shining entry in the world’s library of Helen of Troy adaptations. I keep it on the shelf next to my Homer and Vergil. (And next to my own book—please forgive a poet her shy adoration.)

Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University, and has spent many years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Maria’s work has previously appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner, 2025), earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick.

Twilight Of The Cowboys: A Glance At The Origin Of Country Music

Marcus Spiegel

I’m not one of those people who can say country music flows in my blood. As a city boy from midwestern Canada, during adolescence I rarely ventured outside my musical comfort zone, the boundaries of which were marked by the groovy soundscapes of Aerosmith and the distortion soup of Seattle grunge. Later, in the more rebellious high noon of youth, I still kept well away from mandolins and fiddles, spurning singers whose voices jittered with the pop and spring of Nashville twang. Instead I preferred to teleport all the way back to Vivaldi and the archbishops of baroque, working up to the Classical and Romantic periods, stately operas and sublime concertos, music for kings and duchesses who sat watching from balconies while they stroked their cats. I had zero affection for saloons and dusty leather boots. Hillbilly shrieks disturbed me at a cellular level. I’d always been indifferent to the sight of my native province’s endless wheat fields, and the instant I possessed a modicum of self-determination I felt compelled to leave the heartland for the sort of metropolises where the sky is no more than a conceit and the subway maps are as intricate as the fantastical lands sketched out by Ursula Le Guin.

Nevertheless, even urban sophisticates and would-be intellectuals are not immune to the guitar-and-harmonica offerings of Bob Dylan. Dylan is the only gateway drug one needs to make the plunge into the deep river of the American music tradition. Turned on to Dylan, one can certainly find one’s way to the pan-artistry of surrealists and the mad musings of the Beats. Yet there comes a time when you become disillusioned by the Zen rap of Kerouac and the nearly infinite scroll that contained his ramblings. This is the moment when maybe you graduate from the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited and, after checking out Nashville Skyline, you keep on roving, hungry for more, passing by way of Woodie Guthrie and the traveling minstrels of the plains before pushing on farther south, searching for the enchanted region that gave rise to voodoo, gospel, and the blues.

Amusingly, the very features of country music that used to make me recoil are the ones I now count among the genre’s principal charms. Slide guitar and southern grandeur, plaintive voices, droning banjos, even—yes—yodellers in straw hats. I can’t help but admire Dolly Parton’s frilly dresses and beehive hair as much as I do her lonesome melodies. And I have no reservations about admitting that I now relish the songs of the doomed cowboys and other motley figures from the Southwest who carry about them a permanent shadow born of exile and angst. Haggard men whose knowledge of firearms surpasses their abilities on guitar—or at least so their personae would have us believe.

Okay, sure, maybe my callow romanticism is creeping in, but the thing is, country music itself—like the genre of the Western in literature and cinema—demands nothing short of romanticism pushed to the extreme. Sentimentality is much too threadbare a term to capture the country music artist’s longing for a life that’s already vanished and is now only an apocryphal memory. From the dawn of country music, back in the days when it was being broadcast as the Grand Ole Opry radio show, there were musicians born in the city who were advised by marketers and crafty managers to impersonate bumpkins and hicks. Some were told to don tattered overalls, or to exaggerate their southern drawl. Indeed, the early years of country music were dominated by two artists: the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The Carter Family spoke to America’s worship of the basic family unit and the sweet joy of a rural life. Rodgers, on the other hand, would find acclaim as an embodiment of America’s veneration for the railroad and, later, of the ranch and the rodeo. Rodgers was famous for popularizing the yodel, and he often appeared in costume for concerts—sometimes as a brakeman of the railyard, other times in full cowboy regalia. Christened with the epithet “the father of country music,” Rodgers was a star in the twenties and was already bedding down for a long graveyard sleep in the thirties, courtesy of tuberculosis. It’s significant that his cowboy wardrobe gestured back to the eighteen hundreds. The Homeric period of Ancient Greece now seems to us a high point in the flowering of classical values. But Homer himself was already bemoaning the weakness of the “modern age,” harking back to some more warlike era, when humans were closer to titans, near rivals to the gods.

Country music, then, professes its bardic origins by being backward facing. But even as lyricists and individual artists have anointed the past with greater worth than the present, the music itself is mysterious and difficult to trace. According to lore, however, it was the combination of the banjo (an African instrument brought over by slaves) and the fiddle (a European invention) that’s responsible for the basic architecture of the country music tune. And it seems clear we have African American slaves to thank for this potent alchemy. While it may be rare to see Black people devoting themselves to the banjo now, there was a time when the most exalted banjo pickers, whether in the clawhammer or the three-finger picking technique, later popularized by Earl Scruggs, were Black. So much so that in the early part of the twentieth century, white banjo players tended to invoke their Black counterparts by performing in blackface. Though this choice of makeup surely had other more depraved reasons for being used, one of its aims was to conjure the spirit of the African American banjo artists, the leading masters of the form.

Recordings of country songs gradually became widespread in the twenties, but that’s not to say this music had a modern origin. One of the curious things about country music is that even in contemporary times you don’t know who the original songwriter is unless you undertake a bit of detective work. I have more than once had the experience of listening to a song and assuming it was an original, only to later hear it performed by a musician on an earlier recording. At that point, I am usually deceived into thinking the second artist is the creator, only to be driven backward in time again after discovering an older version, and so forth.

The first recorded musician is in many cases no more the original songwriter than the Brothers Grimm were the first to tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Many artists in the country music genre, especially in the deep past, were hardly more than scribes. Once the Carters had recorded all the songs they knew, they didn’t set out to write more music. Instead, A. P. Carter, the gaunt, suit-wearing patriarch, went out searching for it. If he heard a rumor of some old blind spinster who lived alone in a cabin in the remote wilderness of North Carolina who knew songs that could make even a hardened banker rosy-cheeked with dreams and nostalgia, he was willing to drop everything and drive up there and talk the spinster into coughing up her songs. Maybe he would compensate the woman for her music with a couple of nickels. Maybe he would merely offer her a dozen eggs and a bit of company in exchange for the primeval tunes she carried in her head.

Foreshadowing the epoch of celebrity rockers, A. P. Carter was a prodigious drinker. His working memory was frequently too scrambled with bourbon to be of any use. Lucky for him, then, that he came across a talented African American slide guitarist and blues singer, Lesley Riddle, who he met in a ghetto of Kingsport, Tennessee. Riddle was missing a leg because of an accident, but he did have the memory A. P. Carter was lacking. Carter brought Riddle along on these song voyages, and Riddle quickly memorized the lyrics and learned the chord progressions and melodies he heard. Returning to the Carter farm after these trips, A. P. would have Riddle teach the songs to his wife, “Mother” Maybelle, and her sister Sara. The results often made for the next Carter Family album, which of course necessitated A. P. having a few drinks in celebration of the accomplishment.

The past is the subtext of country music, but it searches for the past not through artifact and document, the way a historian would, but through the imagination. Even in its formative years, when the sacrament of the music was still untarnished by a plethora of financial incentives and the snare of celebrity culture—which would emerge with Elvis Presley—country music was by no means “three chords and the truth,” as some folks have defined it, but a strange system of theater no less abstract than kabuki. Journey back to year one of country music and you find it evolving almost as a tributary to vaudeville. You had musicians balancing fiddles on their nose. Banjo players, such as Dave “Stringbean” Macon, who wore his pants down to his ankles and was as much of a comedian as he was a musician. Indeed, Stringbean’s criticism of Earl Scruggs, when the latter erupted onto the scene, was that Scruggs “may be a good banjo player, but he was terrible at comedy.” Then there was Gene Autry, who started out as a Jimmie Rodgers impersonator and developed into a star of the Western genre in cinema. Back then, strangely enough, Westerns tended to be upbeat and comedic, and for a while, until he spawned his own set of copycats, Autry was the golden child of singing cowboy comedies.

But much as the First World War created the Lost Generation, the Second World War spelled the death of sunny Westerns. With the films of Clint Eastwood—not much of a singer judging by his later film, the maudlin Honkytonk Man—the tone of Westerns became a whole lot darker. Maybe we weren’t exactly in Cormac McCarthy territory yet, but we were traveling farther out, into more forbidding landscape, where heroes weren’t so much taming beasts as they were meting out a messy justice to villains in the desert. Country music, too, was taking a sinister left turn with the amphetamine-plagued Johnny Cash, the “Man in Black,” who, despite all his cries to Jesus, could not escape the devil’s sensibility. Ditto, his friend and fellow Highwayman, Waylon Jennings. When Cash roomed with Jennings in Nashville for a time both kept their drug stashes hidden from one another, Jennings inside the frame in a painting, Cash among the tubes and wires of the black-and-white TV.

And yet, however much these artists of the fifties and sixties kneeled to the power of sex, drugs, and fame, you could hear in their songs an echo of the Carters’ simple faith in the sanctity of the family and their little plot of land. The land where they were born, where they harrowed in the fields. The land where their bones would eventually demand to lie still. Still but not altogether silent, in the depths of the earth.

Marcus Spiegel’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Boulevard, Conjunctions, Southwest Review, North American Review, and the 2022 Pushcart Prize XLVI anthology. Originally from the plains of Canada, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee. His work is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review.

Dr. Pangloss’s Intelligence Quiz

by Debra Coleman

1. A Woman is found on a crusty linoleum floor at the base of a steel staircase. She’s semiconscious, sputtering, “I fell. My head is bleeding.” (Her head is not bleeding, though gluey liquid percolates from her eyes.) What is the first thing the person who found the Woman should do?

A. Prop her up on the lowest step and leave work for the day.
B. Help her to the passenger seat of the office manager’s car.
C. Call an ambulance.
D. Drive her to a dark campus auditorium where her husband is attending an art lecture. Escort her inside and ask her to point to the husband in the audience.

Answer
The only correct answer is C, though some people prefer to avoid the drama associated with flashing lights and sirens. These people will opt instead to help the Woman with the quiet, dangerous interventions described by answers A, B, and D.

2. The Woman, a senior architect, returns to work the next day even though her gait is up-all-night drunk. Ten minutes into her first meeting, she excuses herself because the room is whirling. Which of the following would be most helpful?

A. Buy her a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of Notre Dame to help her recover.
B. Tell her she must come to the office Christmas party because it will cheer her up.
C. Suggest that she work part-time so that she’ll feel only half as nauseous.
D. Help her corkscrew back to her office.

Answer
Because Call an ambulance isn’t one of the choices, D is the most helpful intervention. Answers A and C don’t address her problems. Answer B is incorrect because the Woman doesn’t yet know she needs cheering up.

3. After several weeks of home rest, sleeping through a stack of movies from Blockbuster, the Woman has not improved. Her employer hires a neurologist named Dr. Lickspittle. After a cursory exam, what is the next step Dr. Lickspittle should take in order to check for a traumatic brain injury?

A. Order an MRI of the Woman’s brain.
B. Confidently proclaim that he sees no evidence of a TBI.
C. Tell the Woman to return to work, adding, “You don’t have a difficult job anyway.”
D. Refer her to an ear, nose, and throat specialist due to ongoing vertigo.

Answer
None of these answers are adequate for the diagnosis of a TBI. Answer A should be done, though it is difficult to image microscopic damage to nerve fibers. Answer D wastes time, as the Woman learns upon arrival for rehab, where she is told, “You’re too late for us to help you recover.” The Woman should immediately find a new neurologist.

4. Three years later, the Woman is sent for tests of her cognitive abilities. After several months, Dr. Scrupulous explains the results. Which of the following is most accurate?

A. The Woman will never be gainfully employed again.
B. Some of the tests were designed to determine whether she is a malingerer.
C. The Woman’s cognitive abilities have dropped from the 95th percentile to the 55th percentile.
D. Unlike those born with disabilities, the Woman will need to adjust to a sudden and unfamiliar person: herself.

Answer
A, B, C, and D are all accurate.

5. While taking a knitting class, the Woman discloses that she has a traumatic brain injury and has trouble following the sequence of pattern instructions while simultaneously chatting. What is the best reply?

A. “I would never have known if you hadn’t told me.”
B. “Well you look good!”
C. “You look fine to me.”
D. “I wanted to mention your shirt’s inside out.”

Answer
The best answer is D. No one wants to wear their shirt inside out in public. The other three answers sound like compliments, but for what?

6. After being out of touch for decades, the Woman meets a longtime friend for lunch, and describes her career-ending accident. What should the other’s first reaction be?

A. “I’m so jealous. I’d love to retire.”
B. “I wish I could nap every afternoon.”
C. “It must be wonderful to have so much free time on your hands.”
D. “You should volunteer to make copies for the architecture department.”

Answer
None of these reactions are appropriate. Skip to the next question.

7. After they finish a brisk hike, a new friend offers kudos to the Woman. Which of the following is the most flattering?

A. “Now you can go tell your other friends you’re not a gimp.”
B. “Aren’t you glad you had some spare IQ points?”
C. “You’re only as brain injured as you want to be.”
D. “I knew you weren’t one of those people, milking your accident for attention.”

Answer
Each of these answers is demeaning. The Woman is learning other people have become disinhibited as a result of her TBI.

8. After being introduced at a garden party, the Woman mentions to another that she has a brain injury. What’s the first thing the other woman should say?

A. “Oh, my memory is bad too!”
B. “Have you read the research about how the brain repairs itself?”
C. “You should try clover grass tea.”
D. “It’s wonderful you’ve recovered.”

Answer
If you’re the brain-injured person, follow the next hors d’oeuvres tray that passes and leave the party.

9. While picking up cough syrup for his daughter at a pharmacy, a man finds himself behind the Woman. She is repeatedly pushing on the entry door even though it won’t open. What should the man do next?

A. Clear his throat, then microphone, “Pull. The sign says Pull.”
B. Reach over her shoulder, pull the door open, and shove past her.
C. Try to joke, “The handles on these doors are useless.”
D. Find another entrance.

Answer
The best answer is D. It makes little sense to startle or humiliate a person caught in the loop of a problem with a simple yet impenetrable solution.

10. While struggling with a copy machine at Kinko’s, the Woman slams the lid down, yells “goddamned motherfucker,” and kicks the front of the machine. What is the most appropriate response? 

A. Grab her papers and make the copies for her.
B. Say, “I get frustrated with these machines too.”
C. Move to a different machine while muttering, “What an asshole.”
D. Complain to the staff.

Answer
See answer to 6 above.

11. The Woman is frantically searching for milk. Her husband finds the carton in a cupboard. What should he do next?

A. Pat her back and say, “It’s okay, dear.”
B. Stick a label on the refrigerator door that says Refrigerator.
C. Say, “We all do these things as we get older.”
D. Ask, “Did you break your ‘one thing at a time’ rule?”

Answer
The correct answer is B. This is the only practical solution to avoid misplacing milk in the cupboard.

12. The Woman visits a town official to ask about a tax benefit for seniors and the disabled. What is his most likely response?

A. “I changed the way we calculate that because it gives people like you an unfair advantage.”
B. “The attorney that represents the town agreed I could change the rules.”
C. “What’s wrong with you? I explained this several times.”
D. “I have to leave for the day.”

Answer
All of the above. The Woman, tired of this test’s answers, lobbies town representatives to amend the program’s legal language. Prior to the final vote, a committee chair tells the Woman that if the vote is successful, she’ll have to buy everyone a round of beer.

The law is changed. The Woman does not purchase beer.

Shroud (Ghost Apples)

by Sébastien Luc Butler


the orchards’ stench / an redolent camp / high school
like a dreaming of high school / riding in the backs of pickups we had

our obsessions / our idols / indifference / & corn fields
& drunken midnight baseball field laying in the grass / yes

staring at the stars / believe or not / there were railroad tracks
we walked them / after forking someone’s lawn / hands blossoming

on a bottle’s neck / a slip / a shattering of glass / liquid left
squandering itself between crossties / there was

so much / between the crossties / of each others’ bodies
run over / ground down / hellos & goodbyes a strummed web

love / a few staves / one for each month / a month
meant a great deal then / in the making of our myth / lithe

fierce / the way the gym’s lights hummed through
the night / or our headlights / searching / a freak october blizzard

i wake now remembering / the frozen orchards the next morning
how the fruit would fall / until / only ice in the shape of fruit

& the dead deer / strung up around the gazebo / their shiny legs
hardened as twigs / slowly thawing / but still hanging there

for weeks / their limp haunches / dripping / in our rearview mirrors

Pleasant View Drive

J.A. McGrady

My parents had just left for my third grade back-to-school night when the officer knocked on our front door. Outside, men unraveled yellow tape around my neighbors’ house like birthday streamers. Something happened next door, the officer told my grandparents. He asked us if we had seen anything, but all I could see was a swollen white bedsheet wheeled across the walkway. After he left, my grandparents and I huddled by the window until my parents came home.

I found the newspaper article the next day in the kitchen drawer where my mother had been hiding it. The black ink smeared my fingers as I read every last detail. 56-year-old female stabbed 12 times in the neck. I heard my parents whispering that her husband killed her, and I wondered if her French poodles saw it happen. I remembered learning to swim in her pool as her husband grilled hamburgers. I remembered sinking beneath the bitter water until she pulled me up.

A year later, the tragedy faded. My younger sister and I got rollerblades for Christmas from Santa. We guarded ourselves with pads and helmets and made rough circles around our backyard patio, falling down and laughing. But then my sister screamed. She had seen him, our neighbor, walking down our driveway. He grinned, holding a bottle of wine with a crimson bow tied around the neck. When he left, my parents opened the bottle and let the liquid flood the kitchen sink, drowning the dishes in a murky pool of red.