Caught in the Myth: Poems by Alison Stone

Your editor’s response to Alison Stone’s new book Caught in the Myth, echoes the last s-y line of her poem “Dionysus”:  “Let the words to every song be yes.” Stone has always done Dionysian better than most yes-men. That’s because she doesn’t shut her eyes and ears to what’s really real. Heroin or her cunt may have been her chariot to a “sacred other place” but she’s fully alive to what’s going on in our mean world (“thick with caste”). Her poems for First of the Month have often been marked by her refusal to be carried away. Many of them have made it into Caught in the Myth. (It was bracing to read her again on our incestuous pres and I have a weakness for her clear-eyed angle on Gabby Douglas’s second act.)

Diane Seuss has got all up in Stone’s new volume:

The first poem in Caught in the Myth begins “Every story starts in the body,” and indeed this collection embodies and voices classical, religious, and historical figures, fairy tale characters, and contemporary icons alike, from Medusa to Ivanka Trump, from Pandora to the prom queen, from Homer and Hadrian to Reeva Steenkamp. Stone imagines her way in and brings nuance and intimacy to her speakers. “If my life can be no more / than surface, / let each surface shine,” her Midas vows. Medusa tells us “Evil has its own loveliness,” a wounded Amazon that “A woman is more than her injuries.” In other poems, Stone writes at the border between myth and apparent autobiography, as in a poem on Sisyphus, whose “pointless pushing” is compared to her mother, who “offered her body / to the surgeon’s knife, made her chest / a port for the delivery of drugs,” all for “a chance at six more months.” Each poem, in its way, releases a living voice from stone.

Per all the stones in Stone’s new one, the poet has explained how that came about “by accident”:

A photographer, who’d shot many of the statues in the [Metropolitan] museum, asked me to collaborate—a book of poems/images. So I spent a year researching obscure Roman emperors and their wives, and writing poems about them. Turns out he never got permission, so I just added more poems I thought would broaden it. Then I got invited to Rome with my teen bestie (we reconnected through FB) and I got to see more sculptures. The sculptures from myth were the easiest for me to do ’cause I do myth anyway. It was a good project, like my tarot book, Ordinary Magic, ’cause it helped me get over the whole “I must feel inspired to write anything” myth.

Try this triptych from Caught in the Myth and I think you’ll agree we’re lucky she got over. B.D.

Grim

Wanting fairness in her fairy tales,
my daughter’s mad at Jack, who breaks
and enters, then steals
not only treasure but the giant’s pet.
What if someone climbs in and takes
Merlin?
She vises an arm around our shelter
cat. Jack’s poor, starving mother
doesn’t sway her. Wrong is wrong.

Life is clear at five, indisputable as flowers
or a shove, before we learn to gnaw the gristle
of compromise and call it nourishing,
before we hone our lies. A time we’re still
awake enough to enter the heart
of the goose, carried roughly from home
and forced to lay for strangers
who don’t know or care
which nest-straw she prefers,
her favorite food, her name.
xxx

Easter

This is not my myth—
a resurrected savior
glimpsed strolling through town
like a celebrity.
I prefer the stories they stole from—
Dionysus felled and risen,
Ostara with Her sacred hare.

Anyone who’s thrown dirt
on a loved one’s coffin knows
that coming back’s a fairy tale,
though metaphor makes its case—
flowers’ color-rich unfurling,
the old dog leaping
for a stick. My daughter
smiling with my mother’s mouth.
xxx

Pagan

What kind of god creates a world
and asks us to show love for him
by turning away from his brightness?
To trade wine, lips, rock ‘n roll
for an idea of light?
Why not put the bible down
and start devouring?
We’ll break into pieces either way.
For the brief time that we have
these bodies, let’s adore them.