Sara Larsen is a poet living in Oakland. Her new book Merry Hell has just been released from Atelos. Her previous book, All Revolutions Will Be Fabulous, was released by Printing Press in 2014. Sara has performed her work widely, including at The Berkeley Art Museum, Grace Cathedral, LitQuake, and at Multifarious Array in NYC. Over the course of two years, she and David Brazil published more than 60 issues of the seminal literary zine Try Magazine.
In Larsen’s newly released book, MERRY HELL, Helen of Troy exposes the “misogynist spell” of the traditional (patriarchal) narrative that condemns her for the horrors of the Trojan War and insists “LET ME TELL YOU ALL THE TRUTH OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME”. As it happened, Helen is neither abducted by nor runs off in love with Paris, but rejects Empire and leaves Sparta of her own volition. Helen’s story, a heroine’s journey, is interwoven with circumstances surrounding the Pétroleuse, or women incendiaries, of the 1871 Paris Commune as well as those of Occupy Oakland. As Ezra Pound states, “All eras are contemporaneous in the mind.”
