Some Days I Think I Know Things: The Cassandra Poems

A contemporary retelling of the story of Cassandra, Rhonda Douglas’s Some Days I Think I Know Things explores what truth really means and asks what Homer’s iconic young prophetess might have to say to anyone wise enough to pay heed to her in the twenty-first century.

We find Cassandra walking among us once more and, just prior to the sacking of a Troy not unlike any modern city, she sheds light on the idyllic domestic life that she shares with her father Priam, mother Hecuba, and the rest of her doomed, if royal, family. No sooner has she relished in the timeless sexual awakening dreamt about by most girls, than she must stoically submit to the indignities of the invading Greeks. As a captive, she pronounces a series of prescient Lost Prophesies intended for our time. However much her Cassandra remains faithful to the figure of the ancients, Douglas destabilizes her heroine’s primacy as truth-teller with a witty, varied chorus whose voices we can’t fail to recognize from the quotidian of our present-day lives. Questions about how to construct personal narrative, the imminence of environmental apocalypse, and the power of young girls make Rhonda Douglas’s first book of poetry a fresh and unforgettable look at what causes the present to tick so inevitably from times immemorial.