When Ilium Burns by Tiffany Troy
Bottlecap Press, 2022
Tiffany Troy’s debut chapbook, When Ilium Burns, is nothing if not successfully ambitious and daring. With titles like “Wedding-bound Million-Dollar Dream” and “Notes on the word ‘impossible,’” lines that effortlessly code-switch between English and Mandarin, and lineation, spacing, and stanzaic arrangement that defy expectation, oscillating between the traditional and the most contemporary (all the while varied with different points of view, sometimes multiple within a single piece), When Ilium Burns proves itself both self-aware and equally capable. Take, for example, the opening lines of “Wedding-bound Million-Dollar Dream”: “While people around me are getting married and having kids, / I am chained to the bottom of the sea.” To take another example, in the opening cinquain of the poem, “This,” the speaker shamefully admits: “I specialize in disappointing / people I love.” Or, to take yet another example, in the opening quatrain of the poem “The Wooden Yamaha,” the speaker freely acknowledges, “All my life I thought myself a princess, / even after I became obsessed with career women.”
Indeed, in When Ilium Burns, the call of marriage and domesticity, the reality and visibility of gender norms and expectations, and the challenges of, even the disappointments with, love and relationships (sometimes the absence thereof) abound—all fitting for a chapbook whose title aptly references what is arguably one of the West’s most famous ancient wars, one allegedly caused by the abduction and rape of a Greek princess coveted for her unparalleled physical beauty. Sadly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, gendered violation and the threat of violence (as well the learned responses to each) also figure prominently, as evident in the first section of the poem “At My Trial”: “I am Procne before she is / chased with an axe, who has wanted so badly / to believe the man who cut her sister’s tongue. / I live through beatings the way I live / through… If only you don’t talk he says. That mouth / of yours.”
A fixture throughout Troy’s chapbook, Master, an admittedly enigmatic character with whom the speaker seems at times to be intimately involved, also and often proves emotionally and physically abusive to the speaker, as is the case of the poem “Somnium Iliacus”: “I do not hyperventilate because I am not the lousy loser / Master says I am… When Master tells me to go away, I cling onto his shirt. / When Master shivers with want to beat me, I cannot stop / talking. When he does hit me, / I see with clarity the dreams he carries. . . .” Or, to take another example, Master’s behavior in the antepenultimate and penultimate couplets of the poem “Sweet Clementine”: “I expect Master’s quivering with want to beat me… When he rushes over, I brace myself with my hands up… I wait patiently for the blows.”
Notwithstanding the emotional and physical abuse aimed at the speaker, the gendered expectations placed upon her, the speaker ultimately and successfully resists both, opening up not only for herself but those in her precarious position possibilities outside such heteronormative and domestic norms, as suggested in the final, hopeful quatrain of the last poem, “The Hike”: “May we hike up a different mountain, / that among the forest of birch trees, / beyond boulders tall as our waists, / light might still grace our faces.”
If you pick up only a single chapbook this year, choose When Ilium Burns. Try to read it just once. Try to come away unchanged. I dare you.
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Jonathan Fletcher, a queer, disabled writer of color originally from San Antonio, Texas, holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Poetry from Columbia University School of the Arts. He has been published in The Adroit Journal, Arts Alive San Antonio, The BeZine, BigCityLit, Colossus Press, and DoubleSpeak.