She was a beloved eldest daughter in a golden political family, destined for greatness. She gave birth to a future emperor but hungered for more power than women are allowed—so she poisoned her husbands and exiled her enemies. The chronicles say that through sex, murder, and manipulation, Agrippina became Empress of Rome and used men as prosthetics to rule one of the largest empires in history. Exhausted by the misogyny of today, Arterian reaches into the past to try to understand how we got here. This manuscript was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, and received an Honorable Mention from Claudia Rankine for the AWP Donald Hall Prize.
Praise
Diana Arterian was my classmate. She was a year above me, rightly so, and whenever she spoke, my understanding expanded. I grew, my mind unlocked, I began to comprehend the world and art more intimately. With Agrippina the Younger, with both its elegance and courage to embrace the history of our darkness—and with such aesthetic muscularity—I am learning from her still. By stepping toward, instead of running from the ancient histories of women-hatred, Arterian, somehow, excavates these legacies with a language and lyricism that holds our horror and beauty in sublime balance. “She does not look away…” — Robin Coste Lewis
In exquisitely braided prose and verse, Diana Arterian gives us an enthralling study of the often maligned and more often overlooked Agrippina the Younger. “I learn what survives best is buried,” Arterian insightfully tells us. “What is buried continues to surface.” But more than excavating history, Arterian presents us with a poet’s approach to history—one that is embodied, sensorial, and always conscious of form: “So I found myself pausing over these vessels of death.” Necessarily suspicious and critical of official narratives, Arterian dares to “pluck the thread” of time-worn accounts passed down to us from patriarchy. In this stunningly lyrical book—rigorously researched and rigorously imagined—we hear history as lies but also lyre: an instrument, in Arterian’s hands, attentively tuned and pitch perfect with song. — Brandon Som
A moving extended meditation on how we attempt to understand our relationship to the historical past. Arterian offers the reader an echo of the explorations that have come before, the complexities, paradoxes, and inadequacies of “making do” with the history we have. — Mary-Kim Arnold
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