Her Terrible Splendor
Willow Springs Books, 2025
Her Terrible Splendor transports the Greek witch-goddess Circe from her mythical island to modern-day East Texas. By locating her in the Piney Woods, these poems heighten the strangeness of that setting and open new contexts for considering Circe as a woman, enchanter, and figure of retelling and revision. Circe appears in an array of roles—friend, lover, mentor, alter-ego, muse—as the poems view her through different lenses, including ekphrastic responses to visual art, narrative rewritings of myths, and “portrait” poems that cast people from the human speaker’s life as the goddess herself. As a powerful mythic woman who works alone and creates a haven for strange creatures and lost humans, Circe offers a way for the manuscript to consider the complex, multifaceted process of coming of age, self-making as mythmaking.
In one of the many poems in Her Terrible Splendor invoking the witch-goddess Circe, Aza Pace writes, "I don’t believe / in muses." But Circe does serve as a tutelary spirit and interlocutor, rising out of a book on a bedside table and into the rugged East Texas landscape to guide the poet’s reckoning with coming of age as a woman and an artist. Like Circe, who finds power in relation to her island, its flora and fauna, Pace draws on the environment where she grew up as a source for the enchantments and transformations of her poems. "Then we can agree / never to turn from the physical world," she insists to Circe at the end of a poem aptly called "Praise." With Her Terrible Splendor, Pace has fashioned a spellbinding and accomplished debut.
— Corey Marks, author of The Rock That Is Not a Rabbit
Interviews
Lyrical, intelligent, and exquisitely crafted, Aza Pace’s debut poetry collection, Her Terrible Splendor, looks to the ancient myth of Circe to tell the story of an East Texas girlhood. Through contemporary encounters with the sorceress who was once made famous by Homer, the poet examines the dangers of becoming a woman, that fraught transformation when the body blooms "open like a terrible rose" and the world teaches us "to be fearful now." Circe functions here as a source of power as well as inspirational figure, offering Pace a fearless model for how to pursue a life in the arts, poetry its own form of witchcraft.
— Jehanne Dubrow, author of Civilians
Here, Aza Pace reinvents the myth of the Homeric witch Circe, transporting her from Aeaea to East Texas and discovering multitudes in her story, her voice and the voices of those around her. Here, Circe is threatening and enchanting, distant mirror and alter-ego, muse and lover, horror and metaphor. She is the source of art and the reflection of the artist, a complex "woman you cannot resist / So like a plum (careful, the pit)." Her Terrible Splendor is a magnificent high-wire act of persona, ventriloquism and prismatic lyric poetry—and a terrific first book I’ll return to with great pleasure.
— Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears