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A review by kimberlybea
A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects by Catherynne M. Valente
4.0
I bought this ebook on a whim from Valente's website. I mention this because I don't necessarily read books of poetry straight through---unless they are written as a cycle of narrative poems---but rather flip through them, alighting upon those which catch my eye. I'm kind of glad I did read this one straight through, partly because it made me notice poems that I might not otherwise have, and partly because, whether intended as such or not, the prose sections, written like descriptions from an academic work on folklore, did seem to have a particular narrative flow.
Catherynne Valente is a rising star in the genres of mythic poetry and fiction; her writing reminds me at times of Angela Carter and Tanith Lee, the fictional academia of Jane Yolen in her Sister Light, Sister Dark series and in Cards of Grief, and the fairy tale poetry of Anne Sexton and Olga Broumas. Trained as a classicist (yay!), Valente shows a wide familiarity with folklore of diverse regions and, in . . .Fragile Dialects, even brings that mythic awareness to the New Testament ("An Issue of Blood") and the agrarian regions of the US ("The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest"). She has a strong feminist sensibility, which shines through, for example, in what is today my favorite poem of the collection "Suttee," which imagines Persephone and Sita from the Ramayana as sisters; the former is doomed to spend half her life in the Underworld, while the latter has escaped her demonic captor through a trial by fire. By now, it may not be a new thing to give voice to our lost heroines, but Valente does an impressive job, writing with conviction and with elegance and not shying away from either sensuality and violence. What's more, as was evident in her award-winning The Orphan's Tales duology, she is equally able to create new folklore, which is convincingly familiar and yet surprisingly new.
Catherynne Valente is a rising star in the genres of mythic poetry and fiction; her writing reminds me at times of Angela Carter and Tanith Lee, the fictional academia of Jane Yolen in her Sister Light, Sister Dark series and in Cards of Grief, and the fairy tale poetry of Anne Sexton and Olga Broumas. Trained as a classicist (yay!), Valente shows a wide familiarity with folklore of diverse regions and, in . . .Fragile Dialects, even brings that mythic awareness to the New Testament ("An Issue of Blood") and the agrarian regions of the US ("The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest"). She has a strong feminist sensibility, which shines through, for example, in what is today my favorite poem of the collection "Suttee," which imagines Persephone and Sita from the Ramayana as sisters; the former is doomed to spend half her life in the Underworld, while the latter has escaped her demonic captor through a trial by fire. By now, it may not be a new thing to give voice to our lost heroines, but Valente does an impressive job, writing with conviction and with elegance and not shying away from either sensuality and violence. What's more, as was evident in her award-winning The Orphan's Tales duology, she is equally able to create new folklore, which is convincingly familiar and yet surprisingly new.