❧ When Ilium Burns ☙
In Tiffany Troy’s vibrant chapbook, When Ilium Burns, classical references coalesce with the clutter, cacophony, and “million-dollar dreams” of the modern world. Recurring characters like Master and Baby Tiger lend the work an aura of bureaucratic satire, of bristling absurdist comedy. In tune with the current soul-crushing American zeitgeist, the speakers in her poems are wary and perpetually on the lookout for the crass and the counterfeit. The highest compliment I can pay this whip-smart debut is that Tiffany Troy’s work brings to mind the irreverence and snap-crackle-pop allusiveness of Alan Dugan’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning first book. I can’t wait to read a whole volume of her poems!
—CYRUS CASSELLS, AUTHOR OF THE WORLD THAT THE SHOOTER LEFT US
Interwoven with Homeric narratives, Tiffany Troy crafts an epic landscape and cosmology of her own in When Illium Burns. The heroes of her poems are filled with desire, longing, doubt, fear, courage, and “million-dollar dreams” that represent the complexities of the human experience and what it means to be alive. The vivid cast of characters that form this cosmology (“Braised Snake,” “Master,” “The Friend,” “Nurse,” “Baby Tiger,” “Little Maria”) are at once both larger-than-life and intimately familiar in their rages and sorrows. The poetry collection deftly traverses boutique law offices, secondhand piano shops, courtrooms, the bottom of the sea, inviting us into its generous, kaleidoscopic imagination. “What for, this cruelty / as I touch the sphere under my neck / all swollen / with this mouth of mine?” Troy asks. The bright fire that illuminates the voices of her speakers and the poet herself is this very sphere, ballooning intensely throughout the collection and beyond its pages.
—WENDY CHEN, AUTHOR OF UNEARTHINGS
I had never realized, viscerally, the havoc at the heart of piety nor felt, on my own flesh, the loving burden borne by Aeneas as he carried his father away from the burning towers, until I read these new poems by Tiffany Troy. Here is a poet beautifully competent to love’s furor and to its enduring fidelities. There is a new kind of heroism here, and it is thrilling.
—DONALD REVELL, AUTHOR OF THE ENGLISH BOAT
We abandoned our homeland for bigger dreams” laments the speaker of Tiffany Troy’s chapbook, but the poetry here is made all the richer by the migratory quality of the text. What I enjoy most about this work is Troy’s willingness to allow the poem to find its own form. This text is all the more surprising and remarkable by its ranginess and generous flexibility. It’s a work you won’t forget!
—KYLE McCORD, AUTHOR OF REUNION OF THE GOOD WEATHER SUICIDE CULT
❧ REVIEW BY CHARLES RAMMELKAMP IN LONDON GRIP
Given the names of the characters in Tiffany Troy’s poetry chapbook, When Ilium Burns – Master, Friend, Nurse, etc. – one is tempted to think of this collection as an allegory, like Everyman or like Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Orwell’s Animal Farm. If so, what is the moral, the lesson? What’s the hidden meaning? [Read more…]
❧ “NOT ANOTHER GREEK TRAGEDY”: REVIEW BY NICOLE YURCABA IN SAGE CIGARETTE
It’s a prayer, an incantation, of desire and return. It’s also a moment in which the speaker is truly comfortable with themself — a new experience for both the speaker and the readers of this collection. [Read more…]
❧ “IN REVIEW” BY SHANNON VARE CHRISTINE in VAGABOND CITY LIT
While reading Tiffany Troy’s When Ilium Burns the line “brain to dissociate, / and to upgrade itself into running faster and harder” jumped off the page for aren’t we all in a semi-constant state of dissociation? Multitasking at breakneck speed, instant messaging and downloads, always becoming more efficient and readily accessible. Within this constant state of more, it is increasingly more effortless than ever to disconnect from life, each other, and the world, to disappear into technology, work, and politics. [Read more…]
❧ “I BRACE MYSELF WITH MY HANDS HELD UP“: REVIEW BY JONATHAN FLETCHER in WHALE ROAD REVIEW
Tiffany Troy’s debut chapbook, When Ilium Burns, is nothing if not successfully ambitious and daring. With titles like “Wedding-bound Million-Dollar Dream” and “Notes on the word ‘impossible,’” lines that effortlessly code-switch between English and Mandarin, and lineation, spacing, and stanzaic arrangement that defy expectation, oscillating between the traditional and the most contemporary (all the while varied with different points of view, sometimes multiple within a single piece), When Ilium Burns proves itself both self-aware and equally capable. [Read more…]
❧ INTERVIEW WITH LISA HASELTON
What I enjoy most about writing poems is following a character’s arc in reaching an epiphany. That epiphany more often than not does not resolve the underlying conflict, for want of power. Nevertheless, it sheds light upon the journey as an experience worthy of our consideration or contemplation. [Read more…]
❧ INTERVIEW IN NEWTOWN LITERARY
My writing often draws from the sounds, cadences, and colors of Queens. Queens has grown to be more than home, as a way of being and thinking. Montages of sound and visual collages come to mind when I think of Queens. [Read more…]
❧ INTERVIEW IN TUPELO QUARTERLY
The characters in When Ilium Burns struggle through what tradition has pinned them down as the holy trifecta of juvenile, woman, and alien. In that way, it’s not dissimilar from Alice’s Wonderland where the rules of the game ensure the characters’ defeat until the characters move outside of the rules, as the other. What makes the book interesting to write is how there is no fixed idea of social justice: no perfect protagonist or antagonist, but complicated human beings. [Read more…]