Blurbs Nicelle Davis’s powerful debut poetry collection, Circe, masterfully chronicles the complex inner life of this all too human enchantress from Greek mythology. Primarily narrated by Circe herself, the book records her post-Odysseus “withdrawal.” By turns feeling bereft, angry, lovelorn, empty, heartsick, and wounded, Circe searches for a means of turning her loss into understanding and acceptance. Her laments are interrupted and enriched by a series of poems voiced by a bevy of canny and dangerous sirens. Their incantatory “recipes” produce a provocative admixture of visceral wisdom and sensual bravado. The siren poems create a taut bridge joining Circe’s expressions of loss for her lover Odysseus, and her later poems bemoaning her loss of their son. (According to legend, their son Telegonus leaves Circe’s island, Aeaea, to search for his father who’s returned to his wife Penelope and their son.) In Davis’s deft re-vision and reenactment of this myth, Circe, too, flees home to recover Odysseus (and, possibly, their son), briefly transforming herself into Penelope to do so. The sequence’s satisfying conclusion is beautifully rendered and enriched with insight and pathos. Circe is a deeply moving, endlessly inventive, and enlightening exploration into the terrors of abandonment, the ageless plight of aggrieved women, and the bittersweet and sustaining powers of love. Nicelle Davis has given us an entirely new and riveting version of Circe, a woman painfully scorned, whose path towards healing leads her into a greater awareness of herself. —Maurya Simon, author of Cartographies
Nicelle Davis’ work emerges from the origins of light and fire, quickly, wildly and with cracks from which tendrils emerge, a longing for sense to be made for those left behind by Odysseus, those sirens, singing gasps of poetry. This poetry wills the reader into a time/space where light burns and language runs off the edge of the world. —Kate Gale, author of Mating Season
“To fight the quiet, I talk to my selves,” Circe says. Nicelle Davis’s poems are the manysided chorus of that complicated character: passionate and resigned, angry and forgiving. They shimmer with Circe’s energy and despair, and, most of all, with her love: for her son, for Odysseus, finally even for his wife Penelope. Not least, Davis’s vibrant language is a love song for us, her readers and listeners, “entering me with my eye / inyour palm—seeing my face, not / as a void, but a window.” —Dawn Potter, author of How the Crimes Happened
“There was never enough about the sirens,” says the foreword to Nicelle Davis’s book of poems, which then remedies that omission by giving voice to the “other woman” of the Odyssey. “I thought love would swallow pain,” says Circe, whose Homeric version turns her enemies into animals. The magic in Nicelle Davis’s poems, however, is the blend of anger, regret, and love that spurs them—the complicated brew that poetry exists to make clear. —Natasha Saje, author of Bend |  Love cannot be translated, and yet it is the only thing worth knowing. Circe Inspired Project
The JellyFish Woman costume by Pavlina Janssen Connotation Press Reading, AWP 2012
| Reviews What happens to myth when it is given a modern literary treatment? Is the romance of the arcane lost when a coat of current vernacular and diction is thrust, thick and bold over narrative, the essence of which is in our collective consciousness? To read Nicelle’s Davis’s debut poetry collection, Circe, is to ask this question after absorbing the peculiar language of her poems. The collection takes its reader through seven “books,” each detailing a modern-day Circe’s reflection on herself and her real and imagined histories. Davis does not allow her Circe to function as goddess. Rather she strips Circe to a woman whose magic is irrevocably lost, and ultimately the longing for what has been taken guides every word of the collection. If you haven’t watched the book trailer for Circe at YouTube yet, you should. There you will get an excellent sense of the tone and presence of Nicelle Davis’s individual poems in Circe: strong narrators masked in myth; an oozing, pervasive violence above a sea of beautiful, lyric sadness that is carried throughout the book. The book begins, “First time I read the Odyssey I was seven, / gluing feathers to my arms, and suckling chicken / bones to understand operations of blame.” Toward the end of Circe, Davis writes, “Sorrow // can be delicious.” Davis creates characters who are hungry for the flavor of sorrow, who will consume themselves and their loved ones for the taste of it. The book trailer will also treat you to many of Cheryl Gross’s illustrations for Circe but with a touch of color and animation. Their jagged nature matches Davis’s tone perfectly—even the roundest of Gross’s lines are drawn with heavy-hearted aggression. Poignant music by Karl Preusser takes the trailer to the level of art-in-and-of-itself. It’s a lovely way to spend five minutes and thirty-one seconds and directing you there allows me to spend the rest of this review on how Circe functions as a whole... ...It is fitting that Homer’s Odyssey depicts both Circe and Penelope at looms, weaving. I see Nicelle Davis in this role as well, weaving together the many strands of Circe’s heartache into a sense of wholeness, a tapestry of beauty and sorrow. In a 2009 interview with PANK, Nicelle Davis describes a different project, Becoming Judas, with: “Eventually there are no clear dividing lines. There is no one to blame, nothing to judge. All is reconciled to love.” This is an ambitious writerly obsession capable of wearing many masks and Circe does this well. Circe is a densely woven book worth many readings. —Lisa McCool-Grime, assistant editor, A CAPPELLA ZOO Not since Gregory Orr’s Orpheus & Eurydice have I been so enamored of a poet’s use of established mythological/literary characters to ink a tale that flows beyond archived pages. Circe is not the only invocation Davis takes on; several sirens also deliver tales and warnings throughout the book. There is much as humor as there is genius in who delivers the poems and how the poems are sequenced. The content of the poems themselves, combined with the structure, make for an all-encompassing portrait of every kind of madness inspired by a love that cannot be held onto except in memory. Through a witch, sirens, and an island, Davis exposes the very tenderness that makes us all vulnerable – sometimes cradling it, sometimes torturing it, but always rendering it truly. Aficionados of Greek mythology will find much to love in Circe by Nicelle Davis. This collection of poetry deftly and movingly reimagines the mythic figure — best known for turning Odysseus’s crew into pigs in Homer’s Odyssey — as a woman scorned. Throughout, Davis blends elements of classical mythology with contemporary culture to create a vision of Circe that is at once timeless and timely. Additionally, Davis’s playful approach to the vaunted “loveliest of all immortals” allows her to breathe new life into Circe and to explore elements of her character that the Odyssey fails to consider. Case in point: Homer makes no mention of Circe buying scratch-n-win lottery tickets, whereas Davis does to great tragicomic effect. Beautifully complementing Davis’ moving and inventive approach to the Circe myth are a series of evocative and enchanting illustrations by Cheryl Gross. Together, Davis’s poetry and Gross’s illustration offer a magical blend that would feel right at home among the pages of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, yet which more than stand on their own as a contemporary take on an ancient myth. An ingenious and heartfelt collection. Review by Marc Schuster Imbued with the same sensuality and fantasy as the classic poem, Circe originates from a modern and decidedly sympathetic perspective. As Davis states in her prologue, “monsters’ faults are not their own, rather products of another’s story.” Circe tells the story of those others, revealing the grace within monsters and the corruption within heroes. In Davis’s latest offering, Circe, she and artist Cheryl Gross effectively turn Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey on its ear. (A brief note on the artwork featured in Circe: Cheryl Gross’s drawings accompany Davis’s poetry with sparse, dark lines. The pieces depict sirens, men, birds, hearts, eyes, and other images offered in the poems, complementing the subject matter, rather than illustrating it directly. The overall mood of the book is captured in the images. They are objects in motion or frozen in place, but always the pictures are surreal, fantastical, and haunting, like Davis’s work. For me what’s most compelling in each drawing is the careful use of lines and colors. Much like poems, Gross’s drawings rely on negative white space as much as the dark lines and colors on the page to create the overall impression.) |