Penelope waits for Odysseus’s return, so the story goes, but literary tradition tells us little about this act of waiting, an act every bit as epic as her husband’s exploits. In this suite of poems, Sue Goyette steps into the disorienting world of Penelope’s domestic upheaval, a world populated by a swarm of opportunistic suitors, a tempestuous teenage son, a goddess and sundry sentient objects and talking creatures. Written with a wit and a penchant for magic realism reminiscent of both Ocean and The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, Goyette’s Penelope chronicles the human qualities of waiting–grief, doubt, depression and anger, but also determination, strength and grace–as Penelope breaks her long silence and exclaims her own story.

Sue Goyette has published nine books of poems and a novel. Her collections include The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, Penelope and Ocean (for which she was awarded the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017) and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spraypainted on a sidewalk and tattooed. She was nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several national awards including the Pat Lowther Award, the Bliss Carman Award, and the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry. She is the Artist in Residence in the Max Rady College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba and Poet Laureate for Halifax Regional Municipality. She lives in Halifax (K'jipuktuk) where she teaches in the creative writing at Dalhousie University.

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“A melodic, meditative, clever collection of poems.” –Jonathan Ball, The Winnipeg Free Press

“This is a tightly circumscribed collection of poems whose range of experience is, perforce, the insides of one, single and singular woman.... it would appear that the very same muse rousing Homer, seems likewise to have visited this remarkable poet.”–David B. Hickey, The Antigonish Review