Fairy Tale Review Archive
Once upon a time …
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
Before | Joy Baglio
Let’s talk about the fairy godmother, before. At this point, she is just a woman, still relatively young, approaching her life’s precipice,...
Sibyl | Kegan Swyers
i decayed to a voice a vowel a stressed syllable. trapped in the glass of my childhood jar. i used to stab stars in the top. insects crawled on the...
The First Time that the Trees Began to Walk | Wendy Dinwiddie
The first time that the trees began to walk, Mae wore pink onesies and couldn’t yet talk. She lived with her mother at the end of the road, and they...
Elegy for a Child Trapped Underground
After the failed attempt to crawl up and out
the long neck of the well, I tried telling
forty seven tarnished pennies about you
Monster, a Meaning
Monstrum: a sign, a portent,
From the Latin, monere: to warm, from
the root men to think.
Salamandrine, My Kid
The twittering machine lies in its crib, rehabilitating its connections.
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.
