What a pleasure it was to read at the release reading of COMFORT, a new book of poems by my friend and DropLeaf co-founder Sarah Heady. Kar Johnson over at Green Apple Books on the Park coordinated a lovely IRL/online event, which featured Tanya Holtland reading from her beautiful eco-poetry collection REQUISITE (Platypus Press), Maia Ipp reading an excerpt of SUGARTRUCK, her novel in progress, and Laura Walker reading from PSALMBOOK (Apogee).

COMFORT is a really lovely work, a rich woven thing. Part Midwestern prairie missive, part found-language assemblage, it grapples with domestic labor, woman’s work, prophecy, property, and the land. Sarah Heady has a wondrous way with source materials, weaving history and presence together in lyrical lists and verses.

I read from my long poem, BOOK OF SYBIL (Gorilla Press). Here is what I said to introduce that work, which is now almost 10 years old:

I was in my mid twenties, newly married, and struggling with what it meant to be a wife in a hetero relationship in a patriarchy. Somehow I got drawn into research about the sibyl of ancient Greece and Rome.

I learned that Sibyl was a title given to prophetesses, women who worked in religious centers which traded in prophecy. The most famous Sibyl was the Cumaean Sibyl, though there were many Sibyls operating throughout the ancient world, consulting on affairs of state, serving kings, the nobility, and anyone else who came to them seeking to know the future.

The name Sibyl has a long etymological lineage tying it back to the Magna Mater Great Mother figure, Cybele (SAI-bel), or Kubileya, who originated in Anatolia, or present-day Turkey, but whose cult spread into ancient Greece and later to the court at Rome, where the Great Mother was called upon as a key religious ally to the Roman military.

The Sibyl served the authorities as a mouthpiece, with prophecy justifying present actions, but she also held an ideological status as a divine speaker, someone whose truth was considered unassailable, even by kings. She was a noise maker, in that meaning had to be derived from her torrent of words. Her authority was repeatedly coopted for political gain.

There is a real Book of Sibyl, a set of nine books actually, which is referred to by the historian Lactantius. But we have no remaining primary source for that work. There is another book known as the Sibylline Oracles which was written centuries after the time of the Sibyls but was passed off through the Middle Ages as an ancient document. This book was written as a series of prophecies predicting the rise of Christianity and connected the old cult of the Great Mother with the new Christian framework of Mother and Son. So this chapbook is an attempt to form meaning from all this noise, all these conflicting origins and texts, which have gender and power at their core.

Many thanks to dear friends who attended IRL and online, including my aunt Kathryn Ma, whose new novel THE CHINESE GROOVE is coming out in early 2023.