Illustrations by Miki Lowe
The poet A. E. Stallings lives in Athens, the place the previous is at all times bumping up in opposition to the current and historic ruins stand amid fashionable cafés. The outdated and new mingle in her work too. A classics scholar, Stallings tends to attract on Greek mythology and conventional poetic kinds—however she makes use of them to discover totally up to date themes.
“Ajar” begins with one thing the traditional Greeks couldn’t have associated to: a washer with a damaged door. When the narrator and her presumed companion are compelled to clean their garments by hand, their frustration turns into impatience with one another. Maybe a while in silence could be wiser, the opposite particular person says. However then Stallings pivots to the story of Pandora’s field—a present from the gods that the titular character wasn’t imagined to open, and which wreaked havoc on the world when she did. What if the field launched not illness, warfare, and ache, however phrases? Language is highly effective, Stallings suggests, and recklessly wielded, it will probably wrench aside a relationship.
Classical allusion may look like a curious option to write about trendy home strife. However relationship points are timeless: Even 1000’s of years in the past, earlier than the partitions of Greece’s monuments crumbled, there was love and bickering and heartbreak. One can solely think about that, millennia from now, when poets stroll among the many dusty stays of the Taj Mahal or the tattered billboards of Instances Sq., they’ll be stewing over the identical topics.
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