The poems in Fabulous Beast explore what it means to be a woman
divided between biology, ambition, and desire. By reimagining the
traditional forms of fable, fairy tale, and myth, and borrowing a
bit from magical realism, Fabulous Beast contends with decisions
faced by women who no longer fit neatly in traditional roles and so
must construct new ones. The first section, "The Sow," is a fable
told through a sequence of free verse poems that examines
motherhood through the experience of a shape-shifting animal. The
manuscript's second section is a long poem, "The Woman with the
Frog Tongue," written in Spenserian stanzas, and organized
according to the morphology of the fairy tale as laid out in
Vladimir Propp's "Thirty-One Functions" told in ten chapter-poems.
At the poem's end, the reader is offered three possible endings
with which to resolve the woman's strange and difficult tale. The
third section of the chimerical Fabulous Beast is "Minor Gods," a
sequence of metrical poems exploring autonomy, sexuality, and
fidelity through the lens of mythology. The entire collection ends
with one last conversation between the mother and child from the
book's central fairy tale. The child, trying to make sense of her
place in the world, listens to her mother speak about her own
childhood. In this closing prose poem, she attempts to assure her
daughter that our very terrible moments are often short-lived, and
what lasts is a renewed sense of presence, of aliveness, in the
world. She allows that this anecdote has its limitations, however:
"I want you to believe me," she says in the book's final lines.
"And yet, I want/ for you those summer nights, too, when you lie
awake and imagine/ all the ways you don't."
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