Between Two Covers: Exploring Maria Zocola’s Helen of Troy, 1993

March 17th, 2026

Welcome to Between Two Covers on KVNO’s Arts Today. Dr. Todd Robinson, Associate Professor in UNO’s Writers’ Workshop, brings us a deep dive into Maria Zocola’s remarkable poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993. Published by Scribner in 2025, the book reimagines the face that launched a thousand ships, placing Helen in Sparta, Tennessee, where she tangles with suitors, clotheslines, daytime television, and the untamed desires pulsing through every living thing.

Helen of Troy, 1993 is a post-modern coda to Homer’s epic, The Iliad, three thousand years in the making. In a nimble afterword, Zocola traces her lifelong fascination with Greek and Roman myth, offering readers context before they navigate fifty coiling, interconnected poems of domestic dreaming and restless yearning. The kudzu-choked hills of Tennessee serve as a contemporary stand-in for ancient Greece, blending myth and modernity seamlessly.

For Zocola, ancient and modern collide with unflinching audacity. ATVs replace chariots, phalanxes of football players substitute for hoplites, and Helen finds herself running a station wagon into a ditch on a long country road, sun blazing in her face and FM radio glassy as night cream. Each poem balances tragedy and comedy, weaving knotty narratives that explore desire, beauty, and the complexities of domestic life.

Helen is married to the “big cheese,” but service to him and his children leaves hungers unmet. Affairs thrill and sputter. Zocola’s language flows with the landscape, shifting effortlessly between houses and palaces, streetlights and torches, Chevrolets and longships. Fields, fed by both abundance and blood, stretch across her verse, and preachers speak in tongues that ride static like the serpent’s tail. Zocola’s ear is finely tuned to rhythm, place, and poetry’s music, allowing the heroic hopes of legend to collide with the domestic doldrums of our world.

By setting Helen in 1993, Zocola excavates the recent past, examining both abundance and violence, and weighing the whims of chance as the Greeks did their gods. In this collection, she proves herself a seer and bard of the first order, honoring Homer while chronicling the little wars of our own lives and times.

Maria Zocola will bring her poetry to life on campus at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 25, as part of the Writer’s Workshop Reading Series in the Milo Bail Student Center Dodge Room. Dr. Todd Robinson will be there, and listeners are warmly invited to attend as well.

This is Todd Robinson with Between Two Covers on KVNO Arts Today.