House of Myth and Necessity: Poems - Paperback

Jennifer A Sutherland's second poetry collection, House of Myth and Necessity throws open the shutters of language as it is built around the concepts of girlhood, marriage, myth, and law. In the company of the figure of Euripedes' Alcestis, the poems move through houses of memory, domestic violence and divorce, cross examinations, and the Fibonacci sequence. As the collection's narrative considers love and suburban scenes, Alcestis--posed as an affidavit, as a gothic disposition on an autumn afternoon, as modern love, as elegant proof, as beads on an abacus string--changes, the idea of her walking across a stage, speaking her lines. It is then the reader discovers that they have also changed through the poems' deliberations, questionings, and the human need to stand before a court or audience and speak the self's story. A brilliant voice in American poetry, Sutherland, poet and attorney, draws her reader into the retelling of a woman's difficult moral choice in myth, astounding in both its timelessness and its originality.