To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet - Poetry by Philip Brady

Publication Date: June 1, 2015
Clothbound, 168 pages
ISBN 978-1-937968-17-5

Available from Small Press Distribution

Also available in paperback

Poised between myth and time, Philip Brady's To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A audacious masterpiece of wit and erudition that blends Homer’s discovery of the world through the prism of an ancient epic.

With a wink and a nod to Joyce (who even puts in an appearance), as a “scrivener” recovers from a heart attack he recalls his first boyhood encounter with the Iliad at a long-ago summer camp. Even with his imperfect understanding of the saga he realized that the Trojan War, with all its violence and intrigue, was being waged on a smaller scale right there, by counselors and campers at the New York Police Athletic League. This intersection of worlds opens the door for Homer to enter, and a rollicking tale ensues.

As the story is transposed from history and memory into myth, it ripples from Ithaca to Queens, passing through a murder investigation, a hacked computer containing an ur-version of the Iliad, Homer’s first poetry workshop and his last encounter with the Muse, a plot to relocate Troy, and a committee charged with writing the sequel. While it is fantastical and whimsical, this unique and compelling verse memoir offers a deeply serious meditation on the difficulty of nurturing our dreams in a world bound in time.

Praise for Philip Brady's To Banquet with the Ethiopians:

I don’t know of any poet living in America today who would even attempt what Philip Brady has masterfully accomplished in To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet. Like a modern-day Homer or Joyce, Brady set out to re-envision his life as a mythic voyage after undergoing heart surgery and experiencing his own personal descent into the underworld. At times funny and often revelatory, Brady writes with incantatory power as he contemplates the arc of life, moving seamlessly between memory and myth, the humdrum and the metaphysical, carrying his reader like a boat on a wave with his lush language and oratorical ease.
—Nin Andrews, author of Sleeping with Houdini and Why God Is A Woman

The work has that sense of the contemporaneity of the ancient, a kind of muscularity and lushness of rhetoric as embodying the physical force of the ancients—obviously the orality of the performance does as well—and yet the philosophical layering feels quite immediate, owned, bound to the dailiness of the scholar as hostage, as exile, as subject not only to time but the power architectures built to manage our anxiety over time.
—Bruce Bond, author of Choir of the Wells and Peal