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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.
——Diane Seuss, Author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Alison Stone's Caught in the Myth provides a sharp rejoinder to the misogyny that has shaped western culture from the Hellenic world to the Trump era. As Stone herself notes in opening lines of this collection, "Every story starts / in the body." Stone's deftly-constructed poems anatomize narratives that begin in the female body, in the body politic, in the sculpted bodies of gods, goddesses, and emperors, and in the body of discourses that have been braided into our official and unofficial histories. In these pages, Ivanka Trump squares off against Pandora, while Olympian Gabby Douglas vaults over a re-envisioned Medusa. Caught in the Myth owes a profound debt to Anne Sexton's Transformations; like Sexton, Alison Stone knows how to transubstantiate the psychic pain of cultural conflict, personal struggle, and political injustice into the bread of poetry.
——Dante Di Stefano, author of Ill Angels
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