"Exceptional . . . Zoccola provides a winning combination of humor and enough pathos to make Homer proud. Accessible yet deep, this will be adored by seasoned poetry fans and casual readers alike." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[I read] it in one sitting and was moved by the creativity and the modern take on an all-time classic. The moment I finished it, I knew it was going to be a favorite book for a long, long time." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful's Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2025

“Sinking into Helen of Troy, 1993 felt like the magic of finding a kindred spirit on the stool next to me in a dive bar. Zoccola’s poems kept me saying, ‘Yes, yes exactly.’ In her rendering of the rural South, she takes things I have felt only indistinctly and delivers them to me with sharp and beautiful and brutal clarity.” —Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas

"Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993 brings Helen to life in the twentieth-century American South—Sparta, Tennessee, where she shops at Piggly Wiggly, calls her sister Clytemnestra on the phone (“cly, you remember when it was us and the boys…”), and lists her pregnancy cravings (“pickles. peanut butter off a spoon. that cereal / with the little blue guys on it”). Zoccola’s use of persona and anachronism are transformative, and the formal daring of these poems, including golden shovels from the Iliad, thrilled me. Helen of Troy, 1993 is the most imaginative debut I’ve read in years." —Maggie Smith, poet and New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“'The woman, was she / beautiful? It hardly mattered. She’d already turned away,' writes Maria Zoccola in her debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993. It’s thrilling to encounter Helen, a woman villainized and/or victimized in countless Trojan war retellings, in this new light—the sickly neon of the ‘90s, where affairs begin on the internet and end in a Perkins restaurant. In Zoccola’s retelling, Helen has agency—leaving and returning of her own volition. Sometimes, Helen decides to exit the confines of the poem itself—'where is helen? i don’t know, or else i would tell you.' This collection is, like the traditional epic poem, sonically beautiful. It demands to be read aloud. It demands to be read again and again." —Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck

"There is a gracious plenty of grittiness and threat in Maria Zoccola’s poems, but the poetry’s verbal vitality, coupled with the novelistic satisfaction of the narrator’s epic-worthy story, achieves the heightened pain and pleasure of the sublime. I cannot foresee a better book of American poetry published this year." —Ron Rash, award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Serena and Poems: New and Selected