When a Girl Loves a Girl

In A Girl Loves a Girl, British poet Jeremy Reed revamps ­Sappho, the legendary archaic Greek lyric poet from the island of ­Lesbos. As with all his audaciously frontline poetry and fiction, Reed places history as now in the present, mediated over by update, rather than consigned to the irretrievable past. As a pioneering reaction to academic attempts to literally recreate a poetry that exists only in fragmentary form, he remakes and expands on the possibilities of meaning in predominantly same-sex motivated poetry in a way that will bring one of the greatest poets of ancient Greece alive to 21st-century readers. Only Jeremy Reed would dare override scholars from the viewpoint of presenting Sappho in a legacy that extends to new generations of her admirers, as a symbol of love and desire between women.