Shanta, Gander Lee: Black Metamorphoses

Etruscan Press, paperback

Publication Date: February 14, 2023

Publisher Marketing: What happens when the myth of Narcissus is revisited within the context of imperialism? How do Hades, Persephone, Hunger, Tereus, Procne, Philomela, and Erysicthon arrive in the so-called New World? What is the result when a whole group is stricken with a hunger that, when satiated, remains unquenchable while causing an unnamable, unquantifiable damage? When colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy are internalized or become the backdrop against one's ancestral and current lived experience, how does it become deciphered?Shanta Lee Gander's Black Metamorphoses pierces a 2000+ year-old veil connecting directly to Ovid's Metamorphoses raising these and other questions in a conversation and interrogation. Pulling from a range of Ovidian myths, Black Metamorphoses rises above direct conversion of the work adventuring into explorations of the Black psyche, body, soul, and experience through inversion, bending, and taking brazen chances in this poetry collection. These verses appear in a range of forms, tones, and voices from a re-imagining of Ovid's dactylic hexameter to engagement of the pantoum to the incorporation of jazz within poetic verse. Along with the audacious inversion of these stories, the reader encounters a shapeshifting Black body that has been forcibly travelled through time. Black Metamorphoses invites the moment to unflinchingly reckon with the consequences of these truths inviting all of us to decode the known and unknown parts of a history that defies a true telling.