Medusa Retold by Sarah Wallis, Fly on the Wall Press, 2020
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
Greek myth can be cruel to women. Take Medusa, for instance. Abused by the gods and turned into a monster. Weaponized to turn others to stone. Scotland-based poet Sarah Wallis inverts this myth in her highly imaginative coming-to-age chapbook, Medusa Retold.
Meet Nuala, the heroine of this long-form narrative poem. A “headstrong girl with her outsize feelings for the sea and her cool-eyed creatures.” Instead of snakes, Wallis imbues her young protagonist with the symbolism of jellyfish and other sea creatures: “primal with desperate, cold, strange furies, burning within and waiting to burst forth.” We watch Nuala grow up, suffer the indignities of childhood and adolescence. She eventually forms a band with a girl named Athena, whom she crushes on. They are close until the relationship is torn apart by tragedy. A man enters her life. In the traditional myth, it is a man who ends up beheading Medusa. In this retelling, though, it is the girl who bests the man: “she becomes what she always had the potential to become / the Godhead, the steely-eyed Gorgon, the Medusa re-born.” By the end of the tale, the reborn Medusa claims space for herself, triumphantly: “I was made for more than this, so much more than this, and only to Athena will I bend and yield.”
Wallis is a dazzling poet. And her chapbook is full of great lines, like these ones: “A boat is a crib, or a coffin / launched in hope or lament.” Medusa Retold is a fun feminist take on classic myth. It should appeal to lit lovers, but it’s also entertaining and accessible enough to engage readers unfamiliar with the original myth. It’s a glorious reworking from a poet coming into her own.
