Medusa’s Confusion
A review of Sandra Kasturi’s The Medusa Quintet in Tesseracts 14: Strange Canadian Stories (Edge, 2010)
By Derek Newman-Stille
In her poem The Medusa Quintet, Sandra Katsuri re-envisions the story of Medusa. She is created as a largely unaware and unquestioning woman who is coping with ideas of perfection and an imperfect body. Her body is destroyed and her vain sisters cannot look at her due to their desire to gaze at themselves.
This brilliant reinterpretation of the Medusa myth situates her not as a monster but as an innocent and naive woman who misinterprets the oracles around her and assumes a saviour in an enemy who cannot see beyond her surface appearance.
Poetry often takes as its subject the idea of beauty, and this poem questions notions of beauty, reverses them and calls the reader to examine ideas of appearance and the underpinnings of the beauty myth.
To explore this and other volumes of the Tesseracts books, visit the Edge website at http://www.edgewebsite.com/ . You can explore mor about Sandra Kasturi on her website at http://sandrakasturi.com/ .
