Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Troy, Unincorporated

Troy, Unincorporated

Abbate, Francesca

Paperback

Series: Phoenix Poets

General Poetry

ISBN10: 0226001202
ISBN13: 9780226001203
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: May 24 2012
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in Troy, Unincorporated offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer's tragedy Troilus and Criseyde. The tale's unrooted characters now find themselves adrift in the industrialized farmlands, strip malls, and half-tenanted historic downtowns of south-central Wisconsin, including the real, and literally unincorporated, town of Troy. Allusive and often humorous, they retain an affinity with Chaucer, especially in terms of their roles: Troilus, the good courtly lover, suffers from the weeps, or, in more modern terms, depression. Pandarus, the hard-working catalyst who brings the lovers together in Chaucer's poem, is here a car mechanic. Chaucer's narrator tells a story he didn't author, claiming no power to change the course of events, and the narrator and characters in Troy, Unincorporated struggle against a similar predicament. Aware of themselves as literary constructs, they are paradoxically driven by the desire to be autonomous creatures-tale tellers rather than tales told. Thus, though Troy, Unincorporated follows Chaucer's plot-Criseyde falls in love with Diomedes after leaving Troy to live with her father, who has broken his hip, and Troilus dies of a drug overdose-it moves beyond Troilus's death to posit a possible fate for Criseyde on this litel spot of erthe.

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