Unto Herself: A Devotional Anthology for Independent Goddesses, the latest of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina/Neos Alexandria devotional anthologies, is now out and available for purchase. You can find out more about it here, and you can order it here.
I have a short essay in the book, “An Unusual Holiday for Hestia in Roman Egypt,” and I also have twelve poems in the book: “Nehalennia,” “Anoukis,” “Acknowledgment of Vesta,” “Coventina,” “Artemis’ Boys,” “Lyssa,” “Cathubodua,” “Tribus Lamiae,” “Minerva Capta,” “Disciplina’s Tragedy,” “Three Roman Virgins,” and “Senua.”
“Artemis’ Boys” mentions Antinous, Memnon, and Polydeukion, as well as Hippolytus/Virbius and Orion, with Aktaion as a “negative” example of whom all of these individuals “were not.” “Three Roman Virgins” is in three sections, each one about a lesser-known goddess mentioned by Annaeus Seneca in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei as being “unmarried”: Fulgora, Rumina, and Populonia. Many of the poems to Romano-British or Gaulish goddesses, as well as a few of the others, also appeared in The Phillupic Hymns.
I’d normally be a lot more enthusiastic about such a thing, but I’m honestly not entirely happy with this. My contributor bio was omitted from the end of the book–and that may have been an honest oversight, about which I’m not that bothered–but I was supposed to have had another poem in the book as well, called “The Bath of Hestia,” which I was told by the editor would be included, but it wasn’t in the end. Rather than an itemized list on the contract I signed for Bibliotheca Alexandrina, since there were so many poems, and the editor wasn’t sure which of the ones that were reprints she’d be including at the time, the words “a selection of poems” were used, and thus I’m sure the editor decided that it was within her rights and what I agreed to on paper to just pick whichever ones she wanted and that was that…but, given that she did give me her verbal okay in an e-mail that she’d include the other poem, and I had expressed a specific preference for including the newly-written things I’d created especially for this anthology rather than reprints if there was an issue of either space limitations (which was clearly not an issue–it’s not a very large volume), or if there were too many things by me, I’m not very happy that the editor proceeded in this fashion without any further consultation or notification.
I do stand by the work that was published in this volume, and am happy to have contributed it; but, I can’t say that this particular project will have been one of my most favorite ones to work on with Bibliotheca Alexandrina thus far because of the specific dishonesty of the editor in question.
(And, add incompetence to the roster as well now–the editor made a “correction” on one of my poems that made it, in fact, wrong, because they didn’t know the difference between “life” and “live”…crikey…Other poems have yet to be re-checked for errors on the editor’s part.)
