Your Turn to Speak! by Lady Red Ego offers a diaphanous and fascinating insight into classic concepts of truth, love, monologue, and tragedy. She explores these concepts through an intelligently collated collection of conversations, discussions, arguments, and musings voiced by the greats of the long past: Zeus, Charon, Medusa, Achilles, Aphrodite, to name but a few. Author of pamphlets The Red Ego and Natural Sugars, Lady Red Ego’s debut collection aims to reframe, rediscover, and diversify the themes, history, and perspectives of the love poem in the form of an ancient Greek play.
Paced through ‘The Proposal’, ‘The Iliad’, and ‘The Odyssey’, this collection grapples with several significant themes with ease. Ego’s poetry is delicate and considered, laced with flair, humour, and deep emotivity, while also channelling a surreal play-within-a-play feel. YTtS! flips classical concepts of Greek icons upside down, and provides them with space to voice their own stories on a literal and imagined stage. Lady Red Ego gives us both a humanistic and divine insight into these giants of literature and myth, inviting us to gradually see ourselves within each of them.
Whilst perhaps slightly out of reach contextually for readers not immediately familiar with the intricacies or histories of these myths and figures, YTtS! offers an original take on the big questions – how we understand love; whether truth really exists; how our relationships with others form self-perception; which voices obtain a platform and why – that we often ask ourselves, and the various interconnected experiences and feelings we embody whilst alive. A promising debut studded with daring prose and impressive historical insight.
Your Turn to Speak is out now, published by Blue Diode Press
