Troy, Unincorporated

Daily it storms: dams give out, a lake in the next county empties, every river swells. And the story says this is love, this is hope, Silly. It's sorry, but it means to keep the afternoon as I left it: folding chairs at a folding table and the light wasp-colored, an old postcard of this was a factory town. And him (who won't be you, not again, nor still) setting the kettle on the ancient stove. On the table, a receipt he'd written on - something about God handing the world back to Job. A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in "Troy", "Unincorporated" offer a retelling of Chaucer's tragedy "Troilus and Criseyde". The tale's unrooted characters now find themselves adrift in the industrialized farmlands, strip malls, and half-tenanted "historic" downtowns of south-central Wisconsin, including the real, and literally unincorporated, town of Troy. Allusive and often humorous, they retain an affinity with Chaucer, especially in terms of their roles: Troilus, the courtly lover, suffers from depression. Pandarus, the hardworking catalyst who brings the lovers together in Chaucer's poem, is here a car mechanic. Aware of themselves as literary constructs, the narrator and characters in "Troy", "Unincorporated" are paradoxically driven by the desire to be autonomous creatures - tale tellers rather than tales told. Thus, through "Troy", "Unincorporated" follows Chaucer's plot, it moves beyond Chaucer to posit a possible fate for Criseyde on this "litel spot of erthe."