**In fierce, textured voices, the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim
their stories and challenge the power of myth
**
I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people's
tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I'll
tell it myself.
Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the
famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story
of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the
beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous
transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and
modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape,
revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks
in the heart of Ovid's narratives, stories that helped build and
perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and
literature.
Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech
and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina
MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is
lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She
breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.
