Emily August reviews Cat Dossett

We have learned of a generous review of one of last year's Komma Series chapbooks, Odysseus & Eden by Cat Dossett:

Y’all, just yesterday I was musing about starting a utopian society organized around poetry. Lo and behold, today I picked up this little morsel of versitude from Pen and Anvil Press’s Komma Series, a series of micro-chapbook publications. Check out the series mission statement:“The bite-sized booklets of the Komma Series are a mouthful of literature each, intended to be read in a single sitting. When you’re done with one, pass it along! Look for them lying around in Boston, Portland, or New York City. When you see one waiting to be read, go ahead and pick it up. Give it a home in your hands for a ten-minute lit snack. Then when you’re finished, leave it behind for the next person to find, in an ATM lobby, on a train station bench, in the coffeeshop, at the pub.” 

Cat Dossett’s Odysseus & Eden is the 18th publication in the series. This smart, ruminating collection brings together three fascinating persona poems from the perspectives of three different mythical women: Penelope, Ophelia, and an unnamed Garden of Eden resident who seems to be Eve. These are feminist retellings that humanize and complicate three of western patriarchy’s most blamed and besieged female archetypes. The famously loyal Penelope, whose characteristic virtue is that she remained faithful to her absent husband Odysseus for twenty years despite over a hundred love interests, here finally unleashes her libidinal rage in a surprising way. Eve—the legendary scapegoat blamed for an entire humanity’s fall from grace (eye roll)—is reimagined as an embodied sexual subject who transgresses erogenous, rather than culinary, boundaries. And Ophelia, who we’re used to seeing as the tragic, long-suffering victim of Hamlet’s self-interested scheming, here compassionately contemplates her own history of mental illness.

The main theme Dossett draws from each tale is erotic betrayal, and the recurring image that links the poems together is blood, which smears and pools across the poems like an accusation. As a result, readers see these grossly twisted “love” stories for what they truly are. 

Dossett highlights the ways in which women have historically been sacrificed for the preservation of various kinds of kingdoms, and the ways those sacrifices are naturalized and glorified by being codified as myth. Like the best myth and fairy tale revisions, these poems helped me reexamine and deeply reconsider what our treasured cultural legends are truly encoding and passing down. 

#TheSealeyChallenge, day 28.  

The reviewer, Emily August, is an Assistant Professor of literature at Stockton University, and she came to Dossett's work as part of the Sealey Challenge, in which participants commit to reading a new book or chapbook of poetry every day in the month of August. If you'd like to receive a complimentary copy of one of our Pen & Anvil poetry publications for your own Sealey Challenge reviewing in 2021, drop us a line.