Sappho fr. 16V is often read as a repudiation of the heroic military ethos of Homer’s Iliad. It is argued here instead that the fragment presents Helen as an exemplar of how to negotiate erotic and personal preferences that lie outside of Homeric epic’s binaries. With Sedgwick’s “third alternative” as its model, the chapter traces some of the patterns that link Helen to Troy, in both epic and lyric, and explores how these intersect with the desire the singer of Sappho fr. 16V feels for her absent lover, Anactoria. Sappho, it is argued, chooses for herself the “third alternative” that the Iliad refuses, modeling her Anactoria on an almost-queer male hero from that poem, and at the same time celebrating Helen’s subversive orientation toward the poetics of female memory in the Odyssey.

This chapter offers a new reading of Sappho’s Tithonos Poem, and turns to Sedgwick’s “bardo” writings as a framework for exploring the feeling of suspension that characterizes Sappho’s poem. Sappho’s lyrics respond to the absences and silences in epic, as well as to what is more explicitly there. Often, the body in Sappho can be understood as providing cues for the voice, with symptoms arising within the body prompting the singer’s recall of certain mythical parallels. In the Tithonos Poem, for example, the singer’s sense of heaviness in her limbs prompts her recall of the mythical figure Tithonos, the ever-aging yet deathless lover of Dawn. It is argued that the singer’s own groaning lament becomes intertwined with that of Dawn for Tithonos, but it also potentially channels Achilles’ mourning for Patroklos. Sappho ventriloquizes the voices of Homeric characters. This has been acknowledged in the case of Helen but as this chapter argues, Achilles’ mournful lament also provides a surprising and powerful zone of contact between the worlds of epic and lyric.

Chapter 3 looks at the way Sappho responds to material objects in Homer, and explores how plaiting becomes a metaphor for Sappho’s own poetic production. With readings of some of the lesser-known fragments (e.g., frr. 102V, 110V, and 22), as well as a re-examination of Aphrodite’s famed epithet (poikilothronos) in fr. 1, this chapter highlights Sappho’s generic range and poetic creativity, as well as her noncompetitive appropriation of the affects of fear, desire, and breathlessness that are associated with weaponry in the Iliad. In Sappho’s lyrics, similar emotions are produced by women’s garments, jewelry, and other forms of bodily adornment. The chapter ends with an interpretation of Alcaeus 140V, whose orientation towards Homeric weaponry, it is argued, is distinctly more aspirational than wily and playful.

This chapter brings Sappho fr. 44V into dialogue with queer theorist Lee Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurism. As part of its represention of the wedding entourage of Andromache and Hector, Sappho fr. 44V invites us to reconsider the value of “undying fame” (aphthiton kleos) when this eminently heroic commodity is imported from martial epic into a poetic space where love, desire, and marriage overshadow military pursuits. It is argued that Sappho fr. 44V is a wedding song being queered at the very moment of its performance. It is not just not a real wedding song, and therefore a fictional wedding song – which is where those who have rejected the epithalamium hypothesis have tended to leave it. Rather, Sappho fr. 44V is a “wedding song” inverted, turned inside out.

A brief epilogue on Sappho’s playful inversion of epic temporalities, particularly night and day, concludes the book. Finding in the alienated nocturnal rhythms and domestic scenes material from which to fashion her own songs, Sappho amplifies the queer potential of Homeric narrative. She reassembles epic elements into new patterns, finding nurturance, and a source of light – literal and metaphorical – in both the blackness of night and the banks of Acheron.

This chapter introduces the concept of reparative reading and explains the benefits of reading Sappho and Homer through a reparative lens. It argues that previous scholarship has applied a notion of intertextuality that is competitive and hierarchical, thus missing out on key elements of Sappho’s engagement with Homer. It also introduces the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a queer theorist, poet, and fiber artist and anticipates some of the parallels between Sedgwick and Sappho as reparative readers. An overview of Sedgwick’s career, her understanding of queerness and the social and historical contexts for her evolving sensibilities as a reparative reader are provided, as is a preview of the following chapters.

This chapter focuses on Sappho fr. 1V and argues that as an attentive reader of the Iliad – and of the shame and humiliation experienced by its female characters, both divine and mortal – Sappho, rather than attempting to outdo Homer, or to contest his canonicity, amplifies and recasts “minor” episodes from Homeric epic. Her approach is neither overtly competitive with, nor subservient to, the older poet in that she does not aim to recreate the contours and feel of the original. Instead, in a manner designed to make visible what epic suppresses, she returns us to some of the Iliad’s marginal and dismissed characters, showing us the generative potential of painful experiences, such as Aphrodite’s defeat in Iliad 5 at the hands of Diomedes, and her feelings of shame as she is rebuked by the mortal warrior and demeaned by her father, Zeus. The consolation of her mother, Dione’s, reparative embrace anticipates the similar sort of “repair” Sappho herself, as named speaker of her “Ode to Aphrodite” finds in that poem’s evocation of Aphrodite.

Together with Chapter 1, this chapter helps contextualize the closer readings and case studies that follow by providing an introduction to reparative reading and the cultures of critique (and post-critique) within which it emerged over the past several decades. It also discusses some of the key features of Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading, including shame, materiality, queer futures, and the oscillation between paranoid and reparative positions.

Starting with a brief overview of the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access, the chapter then looks at different models of intertextuality, within both oral poetic and textual contexts, and teases out how these shape our understanding(s) of Sappho’s reception of Homer. The nonhierarchical, “avuncular” mode of intertextual interpretation is introduced as one that allows readers to find common ground between poets, rather than focusing exclusively on their latent rivalries.