Description
The Psyche Trials
by STEPHANIE LATERZA
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-954-2
2019
“The Psyche Trials is a poetry chapbook inspired by the myth of Psyche and Eros that contemplates a feminist resolution for Psyche along a sensual path that leads from infatuation and loss to self-love and discovery.”
Stephanie Laterza is a writer and attorney from Brooklyn, NY. Stephanie is the recipient of a SU-CASA 2018 artist-in-residence award from the Brooklyn Arts Council and the author of feminist legal thriller, The Boulevard Trial. Stephanie’s works of poetry and short fiction have appeared in various publications, including L’Éphémère Review, First Literary Review-East, Ovunque Siamo, A Gathering of the Tribes, Newtown Literary, The Nottingham Review, and Obra/Artifact.
Jim Story –
Pick a favorite; I dare you! Stephanie Laterza’s The Psyche Trials is a collection of grippingly honest love poems. She explores love in all its complexities: the sweet, the bittersweet, the hot, the familial, the simply perplexing, the vastly disconcerting. The distressing. The dissonant. Some are flint-edged, as if scrubbed with a Brillo pad; others are washed with the dewy stardust we’ve all sometimes felt. Moreover, her collection is a landscape where thought and metaphor meld into one.
There are also wonderfully noisy poems here! Check out the delightful verse about a long-ago instance of bed-pounding ecstasy that, unfortunately, morphed over time into just listening—unavoidably—to the bed-pounding ecstasy next door (“Vibrations”).
Each of these fine poems is couched in images both beautiful and fresh, whether seen through perfume-scented gauze, or as clipped and brutal as a blacksmith’s hammer. “I dreamt I chewed its veins as I slept” (“In the Room”). “The Same Cold” tips into a resigned sadness. In “Star Drop,” we have it all: “like an old lover driving off/in the coal gray night/plotted once with the silence/of ecstatic and endless stars.” And “Cherimoya Heart” is a tough poem that brings many things together in its crystalline soul.
Okay, my favorite may be “Simple Morning.” No, no, wait! It’s . . . okay, I give up. One thing I’m sure of. Psyche would be proud of Stephanie Laterza. And so would Eros.
—Jim Story, author of Problems of Translation and The Condor’s Shadow