Brent MacLaine's elegant, capacious, and finely crafted fourth collection, Athena Becomes a Swallow, contains twenty-seven monologues spoken by characters that appear in Homer's The Odyssey. These are not the voices of the major players, but the voices of the minor characters who received scant attention in the original. Here they are allowed to have their say about the events that swirl around them, providing a new persepctive and showing how the shine of the gods also falls on the common folk.