Unexplained Fevers (2013)

Like Anne Sexton, Jeannine Hall Gailey has taken familiar fairytale heroines and transformed them in her latest collection, Unexplained Fevers. Unlike the original source stories, these girls are self-aware, self-possessed, witty and dangerous. For example: Sleeping Beauty feels her ions being pulled apart as doctors perform an MRI; Snow White realizes she's become something akin to a reality television show as people and cameras gawk at her in her glass coffin; Jack and Jill take their tumbling act on the road only to find they aren't cute past the age of 30; and Alice's fall down the rabbit hole brings her into a Tron-like, high-tech wonderland from which there is no escape. In these poems, princesses rescue themselves and run away to other lands to start over, mourn the children they can never have, aren't afraid to blame their cruel mothers and the Big Bad Wolf is a sleazy used car salesman, but this Little Red has a knife under her cloak. Try not to expect too much magic, one princess warns, but their is magic and dark beauty to spare in Gailey's wonderful new book.