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Unexplained Fevers
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Poetry (2013)"Unexplained Fevers plucks the familiar fairy tale heroines and drops them into alternate landscapes. Unlocking them from the old stories is a way to 'rescue the other half of [their] souls.' And so Sleeping Beauty arrives at the emergency room, Red Riding Hood reaches the car dealership, and Rapunzel goes wandering in the desert - their journeys, re-imagined in this inventive collection of poems, produce other dangers, betrayals and nightmares, but also bring forth great surprise and wonder." —Rigoberto González, author of Black Blossoms
Unexplained Fevers, the third full-length poetry collection from Jeannine Hall Gailey, is due for release in Spring 2013 from New Binary Press.
Unexplained Fevers, the third full-length poetry collection from Jeannine Hall Gailey, is due for release in Spring 2013 from New Binary Press.
76 pages, Paperback
First published March 30, 2013
975 people want to read
About the author
Jeannine Hall Gailey
21 books144 followersJeannine Hall Gailey is a poet with Multiple Sclerosis who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of six books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006,) She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011,) Unexplained Fevers (New Binary Press, 2013) The Robot Scientist's Daughter (Mayapple Press, 2015), the winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA's Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World, and the upcoming from BOA Editions, Flare, Corona. She's also written a guide to marketing for poets, PR for Poets. Her poems were featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac and Verse Daily, and included in 2007's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Her work has appeared in journals like The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Poetry Review, and Poetry. She has an MA in English from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Pacific University.
Jeannine also writes book reviews which have appeared in The Rumpus, American Book Review, Calyx, The Pedestal Magazine, and The Cincinnati Review.
She has written technical articles and published a book on early web services technology with Microsoft Press in 2004.
Jeannine also writes book reviews which have appeared in The Rumpus, American Book Review, Calyx, The Pedestal Magazine, and The Cincinnati Review.
She has written technical articles and published a book on early web services technology with Microsoft Press in 2004.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 13, 2013
Gailey returns to the world of Western fairy tales for inspiration and what enchanting spells of poems she casts from them. We see Red Riding Hood at the car dealership and Sleeping Beauty undergoing an MRI.
Gailey does far more than updating fairy tales into modern situations however. I love the poems where she weaves Biblical imagery with the fairy tale roots. Don't miss "The Princess Becomes a Prophet."
Her poems are both accessible and haunting. I found myself chewing over lines and images long after I first read the poem and understood it.
If you loved her first book, be sure to add this one to your cart. And if you have yet to discover this wonderful poet, you're in for a treat.
Gailey does far more than updating fairy tales into modern situations however. I love the poems where she weaves Biblical imagery with the fairy tale roots. Don't miss "The Princess Becomes a Prophet."
Her poems are both accessible and haunting. I found myself chewing over lines and images long after I first read the poem and understood it.
If you loved her first book, be sure to add this one to your cart. And if you have yet to discover this wonderful poet, you're in for a treat.
June 11, 2013
This is a wonderful collection of poetry which I will review in full on http://www.amazingstoriesmag.com
June 13, 2013
Jeannine Hall Gailey had already made my list of must-follow poets after I’d happened upon her first book, Becoming the Villainess, but her variations on kitsune folktale made an even stronger impression when I read her second collection, She Returns to the Floating World, in the summer of 2012. I was equally impressed by the way she drew on anime and cosplay in poems that seems both personal and mythical.
Since I tend to focus on folklore and cultural history in the lessons I craft for “The True Fairy Tale Poem,” an online workshop offered by the Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative, I am always on the lookout for new books to add to my recommendation list.
Although I will recommend a number of poems in Unexplained Fevers, including “Sleeping Beauty Has an MRI,” “A True Princess Bruises,” and “Snow White Imagines Herself,” I can’t say that I was as enamored of Gailey’s latest book as I had been of her others. I do suspect that other readers may not experience a similar letdown, especially if those readers have not been exposed to as much revisionist fairy lore as I have.
As I read, I found myself thinking that this book might be marketed to a young adult audience since its poems do come across as decidedly accessible, although I’m not sure if teen readers will feel as much empathy for the childless and/or chronically ill heroines featured in a number of these pieces.
I suspect that I did not feel as thrilled by these poems as I had by the ones in Floating World simply because Gailey has chosen to focus on better known European characters (Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) in Unexplained Fevers. I was not as familiar with the fox-wife legends (and Gailey’s introduction to this figure did inspire me to read Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, another book that left me feeling like I’d just witnessed a close encounter with exotic kind).
Anne Sexton has already covered the drowsy damsels in her Transformations collection. Tanith Lee and Angela Carter had already spun those spindles with their Grimm and Perrault variants in prose form. The characters in Gailey’s latest volume are also featured players in Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. I suspect all revisionists must work much harder to keep me from nodding when they’re working with archetypes I think I know too well.
However, I must admit to being fascinated with the way that Gailey drew attention to the invalid status of her fairy tale females. Feminist critics have been complaining about the passivity of this lot for decades. But, Gailey cleverly presents Snow White as a girl “under glass / a living documentary on chronic fatigue, on toxins” (p. 63). In another poem, Sleeping Beauty undergoes magnetic resonance imagining in order to determine if her condition is the result of “epilepsy, stroke, tumor, coma” (p. 6). As for the princess known to be sensitive to peas, even when mattresses are piled between her skin and one of the offending pulse seeds: medical examiners quiz her as to “her skin, scratch-tests, bleeding time / and bruises, the red in the water she rinsed her teeth with” (p. 13). If she finds a mere pea so damaging to her complexion, Gailey leads us to wonder how she will bear a prince’s body weight:
She will wait for a prince who barely grazes her cheek,
whose hands move furniture from her path,
their bed so large their limbs never accidentally touch. (p. 13)
Although I am not granting this book as many stars as I did She Returns to the Floating World, I do believe that I will return to certain selections over time, especially as I am interested in the historical relationship between hysteria and fairy tale. And by “hysteria,” I mean a genuine medical condition. Modern readers often think these illnesses (“brain fever,” “neurasthenia,” etc.) have gone away, meaning that they weren’t real in the first place. But I suspect that women who suffer from autoimmune and autonomic disorders would beg to differ. Only persons who have been lucky enough to avoid hard-to-explain symptoms could believe that these historical complaints were fairy tales (i.e. figments of patients' and physicians' minds).
I would give this book a 3.5 if it were possible since some of its poems will surely draw me back to future study. However, I don’t want to give it a higher score if only because I feel the need to emphasize the superiority (in my mind) of Gailey’s other collections.
Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with a digital proof of this book before its release. Since I feared that I would not have time to write my review prior to the book’s being archived on that site, I did purchase a hard copy, which I intend to keep for future reference. And Gailey remains on my list of poets to stalk (through a trail of book crumbs, of course!).
Since I tend to focus on folklore and cultural history in the lessons I craft for “The True Fairy Tale Poem,” an online workshop offered by the Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative, I am always on the lookout for new books to add to my recommendation list.
Although I will recommend a number of poems in Unexplained Fevers, including “Sleeping Beauty Has an MRI,” “A True Princess Bruises,” and “Snow White Imagines Herself,” I can’t say that I was as enamored of Gailey’s latest book as I had been of her others. I do suspect that other readers may not experience a similar letdown, especially if those readers have not been exposed to as much revisionist fairy lore as I have.
As I read, I found myself thinking that this book might be marketed to a young adult audience since its poems do come across as decidedly accessible, although I’m not sure if teen readers will feel as much empathy for the childless and/or chronically ill heroines featured in a number of these pieces.
I suspect that I did not feel as thrilled by these poems as I had by the ones in Floating World simply because Gailey has chosen to focus on better known European characters (Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) in Unexplained Fevers. I was not as familiar with the fox-wife legends (and Gailey’s introduction to this figure did inspire me to read Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, another book that left me feeling like I’d just witnessed a close encounter with exotic kind).
Anne Sexton has already covered the drowsy damsels in her Transformations collection. Tanith Lee and Angela Carter had already spun those spindles with their Grimm and Perrault variants in prose form. The characters in Gailey’s latest volume are also featured players in Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. I suspect all revisionists must work much harder to keep me from nodding when they’re working with archetypes I think I know too well.
However, I must admit to being fascinated with the way that Gailey drew attention to the invalid status of her fairy tale females. Feminist critics have been complaining about the passivity of this lot for decades. But, Gailey cleverly presents Snow White as a girl “under glass / a living documentary on chronic fatigue, on toxins” (p. 63). In another poem, Sleeping Beauty undergoes magnetic resonance imagining in order to determine if her condition is the result of “epilepsy, stroke, tumor, coma” (p. 6). As for the princess known to be sensitive to peas, even when mattresses are piled between her skin and one of the offending pulse seeds: medical examiners quiz her as to “her skin, scratch-tests, bleeding time / and bruises, the red in the water she rinsed her teeth with” (p. 13). If she finds a mere pea so damaging to her complexion, Gailey leads us to wonder how she will bear a prince’s body weight:
She will wait for a prince who barely grazes her cheek,
whose hands move furniture from her path,
their bed so large their limbs never accidentally touch. (p. 13)
Although I am not granting this book as many stars as I did She Returns to the Floating World, I do believe that I will return to certain selections over time, especially as I am interested in the historical relationship between hysteria and fairy tale. And by “hysteria,” I mean a genuine medical condition. Modern readers often think these illnesses (“brain fever,” “neurasthenia,” etc.) have gone away, meaning that they weren’t real in the first place. But I suspect that women who suffer from autoimmune and autonomic disorders would beg to differ. Only persons who have been lucky enough to avoid hard-to-explain symptoms could believe that these historical complaints were fairy tales (i.e. figments of patients' and physicians' minds).
I would give this book a 3.5 if it were possible since some of its poems will surely draw me back to future study. However, I don’t want to give it a higher score if only because I feel the need to emphasize the superiority (in my mind) of Gailey’s other collections.
Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with a digital proof of this book before its release. Since I feared that I would not have time to write my review prior to the book’s being archived on that site, I did purchase a hard copy, which I intend to keep for future reference. And Gailey remains on my list of poets to stalk (through a trail of book crumbs, of course!).
January 19, 2016
I wrote this review about this time last summer and now that I go back and think about it...I loved this poetry collection. I still think about the lines I've read, the thoughts I thought, while reading it.
Review originally appeared here on my blog
Unexplained Fevers consists of a scattering of twisted, beautiful and melancholy poems — also modern-day retellings of fairy tales. Gailey’s poems have a melodic feel to them. There is this haunting echo to her words that tells you, “There’s something deeper in these lines. There’s something you can find here about yourself.” Her fairy tales are nothing like the Grimm fairy tales, nor anything like Disney. They taste surreal. They’re this heartbreaking mix of reality and dreams.
Gailey reshapes fairy tale characters as modern-day beings. Snow White falls into a coma after cheer practice. Sleeping Beauty has a MRI. Alice “[whispers] from the covers of cereal boxes.” Hansel and Gretel suffer from a hereditary disease. Jack and Jill are 30-year-olds whose lives and dreams slip away like pieces of paper. These are broken people with broken lives and broken souls — but they are so much realer, so much more beautiful than their polished fairy-tale counterparts.
In her collection, Gailey plunges into an important theme and raises questions about gender roles and womanhood. Fairy tales have this concept of damsels in distress who find happily-ever-endings. But these damsels are never the heroines of their own stories, never the deciders of their own fates. In the poem “She Had Unexplained Fevers,” Gailey describes the girl Snow White: “her hair ribbon was laced with poison absorbed through her scalp…girls like that they bruise easy like fruit.” And she wonders: “Why do they wish beauty? Why not safety?” This line of poetry is so powerful and it somehow etched its way into permanence in my memory.
Rebirth and choices…that’s a thing we all want. Strength. Chances in life. The power to shape our own identities. Princesses are weak. They’re gorgeous and fragile and weak — and perhaps there’s a kind of beauty in that fragility, something in that vulnerability? But there’s no choice with weakness. On her deathbed, Snow White makes a wish: “In [her] next life, she swears to herself, [she] will be a force of nature.”
We grew up with fairy tales. We grew up with princesses. We admired princesses. Admired their perfect lives and fairy tale endings. But what if the “princess” didn’t want that ending? What if she wants “a little time to [herself]“? She “might dream up a new ending, a new soul.” My favorite poem is about the tired princess. She “cuts off her long hair and moves to a far corner of the world, with salmon and heron for company.” She’s lonely in a strange and lovely way. In her new ending, she “[swims] with the seals, skin turning blue from cold…She [tells] herself stories of mermaids turning into sea foam, women who walked on legs like scissors, and swore not to kill any more of herself for her prince.”
Gailey finishes her collection with a kind of message for us. She says princesses never have the idea “to flee [their] fates.” They wait for princes or friends, “asleep in glass coffins and briar-thorned prisons.” They wait for the narrator to say something…to point them in the right direction. But we…we’re not fairy tale characters, and it’s a good thing. We can decide our fates, we can run away into different endings, and we can chose safety over beauty. Our lives are real and full of choices. In a way, our stories are so much better.
I recommend you read these poems, whoever you are, whatever age you are. They’re fun, quick to read, and maybe you’ll find a message for yourself.
***eBook provided by Netgalley in exchange for my honest review
Review originally appeared here on my blog
Unexplained Fevers consists of a scattering of twisted, beautiful and melancholy poems — also modern-day retellings of fairy tales. Gailey’s poems have a melodic feel to them. There is this haunting echo to her words that tells you, “There’s something deeper in these lines. There’s something you can find here about yourself.” Her fairy tales are nothing like the Grimm fairy tales, nor anything like Disney. They taste surreal. They’re this heartbreaking mix of reality and dreams.
Gailey reshapes fairy tale characters as modern-day beings. Snow White falls into a coma after cheer practice. Sleeping Beauty has a MRI. Alice “[whispers] from the covers of cereal boxes.” Hansel and Gretel suffer from a hereditary disease. Jack and Jill are 30-year-olds whose lives and dreams slip away like pieces of paper. These are broken people with broken lives and broken souls — but they are so much realer, so much more beautiful than their polished fairy-tale counterparts.
In her collection, Gailey plunges into an important theme and raises questions about gender roles and womanhood. Fairy tales have this concept of damsels in distress who find happily-ever-endings. But these damsels are never the heroines of their own stories, never the deciders of their own fates. In the poem “She Had Unexplained Fevers,” Gailey describes the girl Snow White: “her hair ribbon was laced with poison absorbed through her scalp…girls like that they bruise easy like fruit.” And she wonders: “Why do they wish beauty? Why not safety?” This line of poetry is so powerful and it somehow etched its way into permanence in my memory.
Rebirth and choices…that’s a thing we all want. Strength. Chances in life. The power to shape our own identities. Princesses are weak. They’re gorgeous and fragile and weak — and perhaps there’s a kind of beauty in that fragility, something in that vulnerability? But there’s no choice with weakness. On her deathbed, Snow White makes a wish: “In [her] next life, she swears to herself, [she] will be a force of nature.”
We grew up with fairy tales. We grew up with princesses. We admired princesses. Admired their perfect lives and fairy tale endings. But what if the “princess” didn’t want that ending? What if she wants “a little time to [herself]“? She “might dream up a new ending, a new soul.” My favorite poem is about the tired princess. She “cuts off her long hair and moves to a far corner of the world, with salmon and heron for company.” She’s lonely in a strange and lovely way. In her new ending, she “[swims] with the seals, skin turning blue from cold…She [tells] herself stories of mermaids turning into sea foam, women who walked on legs like scissors, and swore not to kill any more of herself for her prince.”
Gailey finishes her collection with a kind of message for us. She says princesses never have the idea “to flee [their] fates.” They wait for princes or friends, “asleep in glass coffins and briar-thorned prisons.” They wait for the narrator to say something…to point them in the right direction. But we…we’re not fairy tale characters, and it’s a good thing. We can decide our fates, we can run away into different endings, and we can chose safety over beauty. Our lives are real and full of choices. In a way, our stories are so much better.
I recommend you read these poems, whoever you are, whatever age you are. They’re fun, quick to read, and maybe you’ll find a message for yourself.
***eBook provided by Netgalley in exchange for my honest review
August 4, 2016
Constraints, Disappointments and Failed Expectations - the New Fairy Tales,
In 1967 Donald Barthelme published "Snow White", his reimagining of the Snow White story featuring a decidedly modern Snow. The book is a small masterpiece of playful postmodernist fiction, and displays Barthelme's whimsy, cutting humor, satirical bent and technical risk taking. I thought of that book and of Barthelme's cryptic fragmentary style while reading this marvelous return to Snow White and other familiar fantasy heroines.
Here, we have a subtle, sharp edged but surprisingly good humored and sometimes almost playful approach that is similar to what Barthelme was going for. While Barthelme was to some extent sensitive to the feminist issues of the 60's and 70's, "Unexplained Fevers" is more frankly addressed to the conflicting roles impressed upon, and oppressive expectations laid against, all of the featured fairy tale princesses and heroines.
"Unexplained Fevers" is also firmly based in the here and now. It is akin to another update to the fairy tale world captured in "Alice in Tumblr-land", (Alice in Tumblr-land: And Other Fairy Tales for a New Generation), a recently published book which brings all of the fairy tale characters into the twitterverse of social networking, and also mines the old characters for what they might mean in modern terms of depression, confusion, gender and identity issues, and general malaise.
All of that said, this is a subtle and delicate work, with heart and brains, and great sympathy for the old characters and the modern men and women who are living their lives today. There is generosity, but also also anger and disdain, running through these poems/stories, and abundant evidence of a lively intelligence behind it all. Some parts may be obscure, (explain all of "The Wasteland" to me), but many lines, phrases and choices are of jewel like clarity or are of great effect.
So, very rewarding and admirable, this is an accomplished and wise piece of work of great merit. A very happy and deserving find.
Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.
In 1967 Donald Barthelme published "Snow White", his reimagining of the Snow White story featuring a decidedly modern Snow. The book is a small masterpiece of playful postmodernist fiction, and displays Barthelme's whimsy, cutting humor, satirical bent and technical risk taking. I thought of that book and of Barthelme's cryptic fragmentary style while reading this marvelous return to Snow White and other familiar fantasy heroines.
Here, we have a subtle, sharp edged but surprisingly good humored and sometimes almost playful approach that is similar to what Barthelme was going for. While Barthelme was to some extent sensitive to the feminist issues of the 60's and 70's, "Unexplained Fevers" is more frankly addressed to the conflicting roles impressed upon, and oppressive expectations laid against, all of the featured fairy tale princesses and heroines.
"Unexplained Fevers" is also firmly based in the here and now. It is akin to another update to the fairy tale world captured in "Alice in Tumblr-land", (Alice in Tumblr-land: And Other Fairy Tales for a New Generation), a recently published book which brings all of the fairy tale characters into the twitterverse of social networking, and also mines the old characters for what they might mean in modern terms of depression, confusion, gender and identity issues, and general malaise.
All of that said, this is a subtle and delicate work, with heart and brains, and great sympathy for the old characters and the modern men and women who are living their lives today. There is generosity, but also also anger and disdain, running through these poems/stories, and abundant evidence of a lively intelligence behind it all. Some parts may be obscure, (explain all of "The Wasteland" to me), but many lines, phrases and choices are of jewel like clarity or are of great effect.
So, very rewarding and admirable, this is an accomplished and wise piece of work of great merit. A very happy and deserving find.
Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.
October 9, 2013
Gailey uses poetry as a medium to re-imagine fairy tale characters like Snow White and Rapunzel in modern day problems faced by woman today. Topics of beauty, illness, and family are brought up again and again, a beautiful Snow White put behind glass or flawless Rapunzel trapped in a tower, forgotten or mistreated by mother. Using these iconic fairy tale ladies and throwing theme into modern world conflicts made it relateble and helped add to the whimsical and airy imagery of the poems.
Taking fairy tale symbols, like that of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and twisting them into representations of illness and underlying deceit was a common thread throughout, and one whose imagery I enjoyed. It was a great way to capture the isolation of sickness and the corrupt ways of society. However, at times, they came up too often, acting as crutches or cliches instead of good imagery. I understand that these princess themes were key to the poems, but finding another way to convey it without using the similar lines over and over would have been more successful for me. It got to a point where I felt I was reading the same few poems over and over again.
I received a free ecopy of this book from NetGalley for review.
Taking fairy tale symbols, like that of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and twisting them into representations of illness and underlying deceit was a common thread throughout, and one whose imagery I enjoyed. It was a great way to capture the isolation of sickness and the corrupt ways of society. However, at times, they came up too often, acting as crutches or cliches instead of good imagery. I understand that these princess themes were key to the poems, but finding another way to convey it without using the similar lines over and over would have been more successful for me. It got to a point where I felt I was reading the same few poems over and over again.
I received a free ecopy of this book from NetGalley for review.
April 26, 2013
I received a free ebook copy of this through NetGalley.
First, a disclaimer: I'm not normally much of a poetry reader. I have a few favourites, but outside of the classroom I've never read all that much. This collection, however, proved perfectly entertaining and enlightening.
This book provides a series of interesting takes on a lot of the classic fairytales, posing questions about the women who star in them, and exploring things from their point of view. Why wish for beauty instead of safety?, the book asks. What sacrifices must these women make? It's a feminist outlook on these old favourites that are frequently plagued with a lot of problems for women: being saved by the man and won as his prize, for instance.
So instead, Gailley asks us what the heroines think, how they feel to be traded and won, what they really want. And what if these stories are just dreams, fantasies of young women to help them cope with their modern trials and tribulations? What can we learn from them?
The answers are, at times, unexpected, but always worth listening to.
First, a disclaimer: I'm not normally much of a poetry reader. I have a few favourites, but outside of the classroom I've never read all that much. This collection, however, proved perfectly entertaining and enlightening.
This book provides a series of interesting takes on a lot of the classic fairytales, posing questions about the women who star in them, and exploring things from their point of view. Why wish for beauty instead of safety?, the book asks. What sacrifices must these women make? It's a feminist outlook on these old favourites that are frequently plagued with a lot of problems for women: being saved by the man and won as his prize, for instance.
So instead, Gailley asks us what the heroines think, how they feel to be traded and won, what they really want. And what if these stories are just dreams, fantasies of young women to help them cope with their modern trials and tribulations? What can we learn from them?
The answers are, at times, unexpected, but always worth listening to.
July 13, 2013
Like Anne Sexton, Jeannine Hall Gailey has taken familiar fairytale heroines and transformed them in her latest collection, Unexplained Fevers. Unlike the original source stories, these girls are self-aware, self-possessed, witty and dangerous. For example: Sleeping Beauty feels her ions being pulled apart as doctors perform an MRI; Snow White realizes she's become something akin to a reality television show as people and cameras gawk at her in her glass coffin; Jack and Jill take their tumbling act on the road only to find they aren't cute past the age of 30; and Alice's fall down the rabbit hole brings her into a Tron-like, high-tech wonderland from which there is no escape. In these poems, princesses rescue themselves and run away to other lands to start over, mourn the children they can never have, aren't afraid to blame their cruel mothers and the Big Bad Wolf is a sleazy used car salesman, but this Little Red has a knife under her cloak. Try not to expect too much magic, one princess warns, but their is magic and dark beauty to spare in Gailey's wonderful new book.
June 11, 2013
As I've said before I don't really know the proper way to review poetry. I can say that I could see people who don't typically read poetry enjoying these whimsical fairy tale-based poems. The poems were reminiscent to me of lyrics by singer-songwriter Tori Amos or other indie Lilith Fair types (though I don't think Tori Amos ever participated in that). I enjoyed them much better than the last book of poetry I read. I think my favorite poem was 'The Mermaid Loses Her Voice'.
I received an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of this book courtesy of NetGalley and New Binary Press in exchange for a honest review.
I received an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of this book courtesy of NetGalley and New Binary Press in exchange for a honest review.
October 23, 2013
Another excellent volume from Gailey.She has a distinctive style that puts the reader right into myth but then she finds out it is reality and it is now. Of the number of poems I enjoy, "I Like the Quiet: Snow White" is particularly evocative of the stymied self, "til the apple drops from my mouth."
February 16, 2017
"Born from magic,
Born from rampion and rosebuds,
My tears rinsed your soul clean of me.
Heretic,
Harlot,
The names for me here are all wrong,
Lack imagination.
My fists grown into briars,
All ready for your embrace"
Born from rampion and rosebuds,
My tears rinsed your soul clean of me.
Heretic,
Harlot,
The names for me here are all wrong,
Lack imagination.
My fists grown into briars,
All ready for your embrace"
November 29, 2016
For lovers of poetry, fairy tales, and feminism, Unexplained Fevers re-imagines heroines (an heroes) of fairy tales in fresh, poignant ways.
Some poems give a modern spin on the old classics. Some give a different perspective of those medieval worlds. All of them saturate the reader with meaning, mystery, and plenty to ponder.
Several of these poems spoke directly into my life. All created beautiful, lyrical visual images with words. Among the favorites are "Risking Our Lives", "I Like the Quiet: Rapunzel", In Which Jack and Jill...", "Retreat", "Seascape", and "The Trail Grows Cold" (my favorite!)
Read and enjoy!!
Some poems give a modern spin on the old classics. Some give a different perspective of those medieval worlds. All of them saturate the reader with meaning, mystery, and plenty to ponder.
Several of these poems spoke directly into my life. All created beautiful, lyrical visual images with words. Among the favorites are "Risking Our Lives", "I Like the Quiet: Rapunzel", In Which Jack and Jill...", "Retreat", "Seascape", and "The Trail Grows Cold" (my favorite!)
Read and enjoy!!
August 7, 2019
I liked this. I'm not generally a poetry person and don't really know how to evaluate it, but I read this to prepare to teach a university class on fairy tales. There's quite a bit here that would be good for a classroom - Gailey uses these poems to bring different, sometimes opposing elements of the original tales to life, offering new visions of what these stories could mean to today's readers. I like the variety in how women are treated in this text - it's not simplistic. In one poem Snow White might be a victim, in another she's a villain, in another she's somewhere in between; really great for showing how we can read a single text in countless different ways depending on context, audience, narrator, voice, etc. As far a readability, these poems would appeal to even people who don't like poetry, and they walk the like between structure and experimentation in a way that is both interesting and accessible. Glad that I decided to read this before it was due back at the library! Will definitely return to it for future classes.
March 24, 2018
Delightful in imagery and language, well worth the read. I felt like I flew through it, even though I have many poems a second and third read. The story of Rapunzel, in particular, had me Googling to find out more about the actual fairytale, but the emotional center of these poems is usually enough to resonate.
February 6, 2022
i liked some of them like the ocean related ones and the ones that referenced nothing modern. i didnt like the ones that were like "computer this hospital that" i am still trying to find a work of fairytale poetry that is just about fairytale poetry and not random modern day things mixed in
August 8, 2020
This is a delightful collection of poems that take a fresh look at some of our favorite female characters from the world of fairy tales.
January 12, 2016
Some of the poems in here are SO GOOD, but some felt like they were slipping away from me and I couldn't quite place their meaning. I think Gailey is an excellent poet and I LOVED Becoming the Villainess, but I just didn't click with this collection in the same way.
May 7, 2015
This was weird. I mean the poems were interesting but still, a good read though.
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