Abstract: Meadowlands, the collection of poetry by Louise Glück, the American poet and the newly minted winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells a story about a modern day woman, who is facing a marital crisis, through a creative adaptation of Homer's epic, The Odyssey. Shuttling back and forth between the three layers of myth, fiction, and reality, the speaker Penelope weaves together a story world with multiple dimentions. Through a multi-voiced lyric that is interwoven with the narration and an overall framework appropriated from opera, the performer Penelope shifts between various emotions and voices and demonstrates a mystifying sound-changing skill. The poet uses a slew of rhetorical devices, such as metaphor, irony, and parody, to weave the text into a peculiar work of art, with a unique language style, within a semantic system composed of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language and a network assembled jointly by sound, meter, and rhythm. The image of Penelope as a weaver can be regarded as the ancient archetype of female writers of fictional writing.

Key words: Glück, female poetry, Meadowlands, The Odyssey, adaptation