Hero

Burn Site in Bloom 

OR buy from Amazon

Reviews:

“Hero by Jamie Houghton, like one of Circe’s potions, distills the stuff of its origin while creating an entirely new and powerful substance. This book is less drug, however, than a sneaker wave to the face, an oceanic Neti pot cleansing that is both bracing and painful, in the best way.

Houghton combines clean-bone lines and excerpts from English translations of Homer’s Odyssey with snippets from scientific sources such as the American Heart Association (on the etymology of takotsubo cardiomyopathy—or broken heart syndrome) to reframe the hero’s journey as a dark, tender and relentlessly human endeavor. From the smart, urban movement of the cover art to the clear, compelling voice, this is an opening. It’s not what you’ve heard before.

HERO I presents a question:

If home is a place
they don’t remember
and I’m not sure
I can find
what is it?

Is it the salty womb, abandoned, is it the marriage, abandoned, is it memory? Or is the earth itself, also abandoned?

In HERO III, the speaker asks,

If we had disturbed the natural order of things
so much that we were destroying ourselves.

The humans suffer, they suffer, they tell and re-tell the stories of their suffering without ever unraveling meaning.

Sometimes the wrong thing is too hard not to do.

In birth, a women knows the pain of opening, "Like a god knows pain." We say her water breaks when a women enters labor. The hero’s dead mother tells him,

I didn’t bring you into this world to suffer.
I suffered for you, I caught an octopus-sized
grief in my heart
a monster //

At least, I thought you’d die a hero’s death.
But here you are, with the shadows, and still so far from
home

This is the understory, the vibration under the song and the lyre that lingers in your ear, leading to this eternal heartbreak:

grace we can manage
but mercy
mercy.

After two and three quarter millennia, Houghton throws us a lifeline, keeps the imperiled journey of the human heart fresh. Maybe this time it’ll all come out right. Buy the book!“

—poet Irene Cooper, Bend, OR