subito

56 pages
ISBN 0-9801098-0-9
$10
Buy this book on Amazon About the Author

Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus
By Kristin Abraham 

Excerpt

Things that are muffled open

We start off slow like this, red.  Watch
the stones tipping off our shoes, the snow.
Each second small and aspirin-flavored,
the learning of childhood. May I sit?  May I
stand?  Look both ways, please & thank you.  
(Curtsy to the crowd.) (Pause for applause.)  
May I sit?  The world is gathering itself up
to answer, making hesitant check-marks.
May I stand?  Lists of hurt already long
enough. Long enough, the world begins,
begins a sigh.  So we’re looking at the
cracks in the lampshade.  Looking for
the yellow to come through, where there’s biology: electricity: math, meaning
the more we touch it, the more it spreads.  
Like menthol, heat rash.  The louder it gets.
Stand back; I’m going to need that air.

Reviews

"The figure of the child, in these remarkable and haunting poems, hovers between animal and human, between the socialized world of first persons and an other world, ephemeral, perhaps wild—the world of the tale. Here we sense not only the child’s absolute vulnerability, but also her resistance, her refusal: “My dear, it seems / that to say ‘I’ is an admission / you don’t want to make,” says one speaker to the child. The wolf is here, but as a threat that begins in the child because it is the threat of the adult world which harms by forcing the child to join: “One choice is to / not talk,” writes Abraham, “Another / is to participate / in the myth-making.” These poems participate, but by way of a careful and beautiful implosion."
—Julie Carr, Assistant Professor of English, University of Colorado at Boulder, and author of Equivocal and Mead: An Epithalamion

"Abraham is a poet who understands the virtue of cutting close to the bone, as well as the dangers inherent in such a practice. After all, she reminds us, 'the more we touch it, the more it spreads.' Here is a poet with 'two reds on the inside' who is smart enough torecognize that in the slippery realm of feminine defiance, she’s both the hunter and the hunted; and who possesses an abundance of wily talent, because in her hands, the reader becomes that too."
—Louis Mathias