So Spoke Penelope

Poetry. "Tino Villanueva's new collection of poems is special among examples of the literary reception of Homer's Odyssey. It is the most extensive and intensive effort to give the longing wife of Odysseus a poetic voice of her own throughout the twenty years of her waiting during her husband's absence from home."—Wolfgang Haase

"An intense poetic hovering over a situation of prolonged expectation....The poems in SO SPOKE PENELOPE are simply amazing, whether in the form of an apostrophe to the absent Odysseus or to the Gods, whether in a narrative past-tense mode or in the immediacy of the lived present, whether in the staccato of monosyllables or in the exuberance of unusual compounds, whether they employ Greek-feeling pentameter lines, alliteration, or anaphora. This poetic cycle shows that the whole range of human experience is contained in Penelope of Ithaca."—Werner Sollors