The Pyrrhiad author at Pride Poetry Panel

Nico Peck will read from their poetry collection The Pyrrhiad at the 2016 Pride Poetry Panel, Monday, June 13.  Xe is a writer, artist, and teacher.  Aggregate Space published their chapbook Save the Monsters last fall.  You can fine their work in the online journals Open House and Eleven Eleven.  The Pyrrhiad is available from Dirty Swan Projects. The author photo is by Kanishka Jayasuriya. 

Per Peck: Pyrrha was the name Robert Graves thought Achilles used for themselves so Pyrrha/Achilles was never one gendered, just as xe was both human and immortal (except for one vulnerability). The current understanding of Achilles as this uber-masculine warrior is totally a Roman colonialist overlay on the original epic poem. My imagined story is that there was also a Pyrrhiad cycle, that was one of anti-war sentiments, some of which still live in Homer's version. There is Pyrrha talking to herself, rather than to God, but the conversation of why fight or what it means to fight in a war is there--the death is there--the rebirth is there. Non-dual thinking is thinking that is divine, that is God consciousness, that is free from attachments to ego, to grasping. It is living that is only love-motivated. 

From a review of The Pyrrhiad:

"Poetry is just the right vessel to conceal a self that is multiple but not divided, an epic is at once local, and foreign, and without location at all. In Nico Peck's The Pyrrhiad, each poem is a map in hiding and a step aboard a thousand starr'd ships, each page a consent that collapses, breathless, into the arms of Pyrrha, who--mistaken for a cis-man--some have called Achilles. Peck neither reveals nor constructs but instead bridges a multitude of worlds by allowing the liminality of transformation and translation to sound off in voices both ancient and familiar."  --Meg Day