available now from acre books: Persephone in the late anthropocene

LISTEN to the original Persephone score, by composer Denis Nye.

WATCH videos of the poems chorus song: short shorts and chorus song: too susceptible, created for the Persephone launch and funded by the Maine Arts Commission.

SEE video images from a visual art exhibit inspired by Persephone, at the University of New England, co-curated by Megan and Jenna Crowder.

WATCH Megan discuss Persephone with Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, hosted by the Portland Public Library.

Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change, as the goddess comes and goes erratically from our warming world.

Through lyric verse, magical-realist prose poems, and speculative crypto-studies of the Anthropocene, this ecopoetic collection, which began as the libretto of an experimental opera, explores both environmental crisis and the nature of story itself. 

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READ POEMS from Persephone, in:

Memorious
The Baltimore Review
Alluvian
Diode,
and
Dispatches from the Poetry Wars

READ AN INTERVIEW: Megan talks about Persephone with The Cloudy House.

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PRAISE FOR PERSEPHONE

 
“If the human species is to survive the calamities of the Anthropocene, its fires, floods, and pandemics, what myth will help us remake the world? In these poems, Megan Grumbling peers through the story arc of Persephone’s descent and ascent like a lens, then refracts the narrative. Here Persephone, whose ‘blues beg bright things freed,’ parallels a chorus assailed with ‘flooded beds and swollen tongues’ and a modern Demeter who leads us from grief to gourd-clamor. Part almanac, part anthropological study, part opera, these imagination-affirming poems are profoundly consoling, as Grumbling shows us how to ‘once more make light speak, and sob, and sing.’” — Katy Didden, author of The Glacier’s Wake 

“Persephone in the Late Anthropocene brings the goddess back to the light disruptively early, and all bets are off. In vivid scraps and lyric stumbles, in fanciful snippets and realized verse, in songs of joy and cries of lament, also in refrains of plain environmental science (hardly cheering but perhaps the way back from catastrophic climate change), in unsung arias and choral bleats and—despite all—in soaring flights of hope (every sentence a masterwork), this end-times opera drags our terror into the light where it might actually save us, rises from these pages like greenest shoots fleeing the dark, the cold, the cruel.” — Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants, The Remedy for Love, and Lucky Turtle

“Grumbling blends myth and reality to remarkable effect….A stunning experience….Grumbling has succeeded in reinvigorating the Persephone myth for a contemporary audience so viscerally that it is a wonder no one thought to do so before.” — Matthew Duffus, EcoTheo