Notes from Source: Hekabe is a sled dog, Helen alternately a fox and a hand-mirror (she changes forms), Andromache a poplar tree, and Menelaos, most remarkably, is ‘some sort of gearbox, clutch or coupling mechanism, once sleek, not this year’s model’. Bruno is known for her debut, The Slanted Life of Emily Dickinson (Andrews McMeel, 2017), a comic-book attempt to fill in some of the significant unknowns about the life of the poet. Like the intertextual allusions more generally (passing references to James Baldwin via Frederick Seidel, Robert Graves, the final lines of Beckett’s The Unnameable), these recycled phrases mainly make the comic’s framework unstable, pulling in material from all worlds, haphazardly rather than systematically.

Further Notes: Place: Manchester Publisher: PN Review