Brent MacLaine’s elegant, capacious, and finely crafted collection, Athena Becomes a Swallow, contains twenty-seven monologues spoken by characters who appear in Homer’s The Odyssey. Adopting the voices of the minor characters, MacLaine offers a novel perspective on the epic events, demonstrating how the shine of the gods falls on the common folk as well.

In this energetic, rhythmic collection, MacLaine creates a world as real and immediate to us today as it may have been 3,000 years ago.

“A classic in terms of psychological depth, creativity, style, angle, and theme… It’s rare that one reads a 90-page collection of poems filled with so much craft, wit, and brilliance.”
– Arc Poetry Magazine

“Exploring the nooks and crannies of Homer’s great epic poem, Brent MacLaine casts a kind of anti-Circean spell, granting a deeper humanity, a lyric consciousness, to figures half-hidden in shadow, fate-gripped. As the monologues build, this cadenced talk of laundry maid or beggar or musician becomes a meditation on poetry itself.”
“‘My imprint keeps. I shall be transformed,’ says the scribe in one of these vivid monologues. MacLaine’s own imprint keeps, and we are transformed — enchanged by rhythms that catch the throat-sounds of unsung heroes, and by luminous visions seen through their eyes, as his art turns ‘rounded underwater stones to gold.'”