Fairy Tale Review Archive
Browse submissions from past editions, web exclusive content, author Q&A, and more.
The practice of retelling fairy tales in the form of literary fiction is, if not quite hallowed, certainly established. The great Angela Carter’s revelatory 1979 story collection, “The Bloody Chamber” — a brocaded work of heady sensuality, intelligence and violence — remains the benchmark, but Kate Bernheimer’s Fairy Tale Review and the several excellent Bernheimer-edited anthologies spun off from it carry the standard forward. Those are just some of the more overt homages; Western literature owes as much to fairy tales as it does to Greek myth and the Bible.
-The New York Times
Baby Picture
We burn his photo under the tree. My friend, I trust her witchcraft.
Two Poems | Brett Shaw
No wonder songs are so full of denial. And what
did you do about that?
Jacinda Speaks
My fifteenth summer, I poured tears from two earthen pitchers and half the tears fell on dry ground and the other half spilled into the lake where the ripples spread like whispers in empty echo chambers.
Garden
Now that night she said we had to go dancing, but first we had to put on dresses.
‘Sunday Queen’ & ‘Queen’s Mother’ & ‘Queen’s Eulogy for Uncle’
Queen is free as a mite
in the Lord’s mystical eyebrow,
growing ears for no reason.
‘Bigfoot Thumbs a Ride’ & ‘Animal Bride’
Once, there was nowhere to go. Nowhere
to get to. My movement through the slash
pines and saw palms was pure physical
expression.
Small Animal
Sara herself did not know the people throwing the party, but she went to the house in the woods anyway.
Coven
We chant around the grill in our backyard every Friday the 13th to scare the neighbors who told the Homeowners’ Association our violet paint job was garish.
‘No Place (Dorothy Reconsiders)’ & ‘Dorothy in the Desert’
Out here the din of tin on tin hangs
just below an orphaned smudge of cumulus,
threatening fickle weather.
The Lemon Tree
A farmer was wandering through his orchard at harvest time, when he saw an apple hanging from one of his lemon trees.
‘A Mouth And Its Name’ & ‘The Hour After Stars’
You told me north water
was not built by virga
but from suicide of the moon.
‘Baby Bird’ & ‘The Barren Wife Gives Birth to a Girl’
I will do the nursing. The suckling and swallowing. He will do the singing.
Spirit Medium
Now that my pen is made of glass
I pray to write of this loud tree
and not simply fashion
Magenta
Once lived a woman wrapped in a magenta skin so brilliant she glowed, but the story doesn’t start like that.
Three Poems
Even if he was a bull angel,
a land whale, a million tumblers of blubber,
a horned prevaricator,
it took dirty tricks to get him.
