tales retold by Paula Bonnell

In this collection of poems, Paula Bonnell burrows inside familiar tales from myth, legend, and popular culture, reimagining them to reveal insights that often amuse and always surprise.  I admire Bonnell’s subtlety . . . These are poems worth pondering.

–Elaine Ford, Author of The American Wife: Stories

In this remarkable collection Bonnell enters sideways, as it were, stories and histories that we thought we knew well. Lucid and lithe, her words tilt us into new regions of possibility. Her “Mama Bear” makes us privy to a new perspective on Goldilocks, and “The Ant’s Love Song to the Grasshopper” turns the moralizing fable into an exquisite, poignant villanelle. These and others claim a space of silence from the reader in which their reverberations may unfold.

–Peter Schwenger, author of At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature