A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects (Paperback)

~ Catherynne M. Valente (Author), Midori Snyder (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Structured around a series of folktale motifs, Valente's eloquent second full-length poetry collection dissects the perceived roles of women in Earth's and otherworldly fable and myth. One prevailing theme is women's subjugation by tradition and ritual in male-dominated societies, as in How Comes This Blood Upon the Key? wherein a wife imprisoned in her own home protests: I did not look/ for a house to become my limbs,/ for cast iron pans to become my joints,/ for doors and keys to become/ the stuff of my blood,/ for a bed to become my face. The young title character in The Child Bride of the Lost City of Ubar is ruthlessly and needlessly sacrificed, and in Glass, Blood, and Ash, a woman's dream of falling in love with a prince is shattered by harsh reality. Fans of Valente's Orphan's Tales duology will find this collection similarly embittered, enlightening and enthralling. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

A GUIDE TO FOLKTALES IN FRAGILE DIALECTS by award-winning author and poet Catherynne M. Valente is a delightful collection of poetry, short fables, and fairy tales that explore myth and wonder, ancient and modern, with an introduction by Midori Snyder.

"Structured around a series of folktale motifs, Valente's eloquent second full-length poetry collection dissects the perceived roles of women in Earth's and otherworldly fable and myth.... enlightening and enthralling."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Catherynne Valente writes in the language of dreams, which is not rational and yet always makes sense. I could read the poems in this book a hundred times and find new meanings, new pleasures in them. It is an astonishingly beautiful and deeply satisfying accomplishment ... A brilliant, beautiful book."
-- Theodora Goss

"A tale of two grandmothers, one mythical, one real, that will gently, inexorably break your heart. A story of a god's petty curse reimagined as a sensual, sexual postmodern nightmare. A sinister conspiracy of black magic and murder hatched in the land of Lewis Carroll. Those are just tiny morsels in the decadent poetic feast found in A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects -- Catherynne Valente doesn't so much retell legends and fairy tales as twist and sculpt them into new shapes, stunning objets d'art built from exhilarating language that never flinch from painful truths."
-- Mike Allen, three-time Rhysling Award winner

"Her poems enchant, enthrall and devastate, and this collection takes the astonishing skill she showed in Apocrypha and distills it, deepens it, sharpens it into a tool to carve stories out of language. If Sappho had written Ovid's Metamorphoses, she could not have done better than this."
-- SF Site

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan's Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award and the Million Writers Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the World Fantasy Award, the Rhysling Award, and shortlisted for the Spectrum Award. She currently lives in Northeastern Ohio with her partner, two dogs, and two cats. Her sixth novel, Palimpsest, will be released by Bantam Spectra in February of 2009.

Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Curiosities (May 31, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934648353
• ISBN-13: 978-1934648353
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #842,903 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking., December 6, 2008

By	Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Catherynne M. Valente, A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects (Norilana, 2008)

Few things are as worth waiting for as a new book by Catherynne Valente. As these things usually go, few things fill me with imaptientce at the waiting for them as a new book by Catherynne Valente. My current monetary situation (and the book's current, as I write this, availability situation where libraries are concerned--a most grievous oversight indeed) had me waiting far too long to pick up A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, Valente's first book of poetry since 2005's Apocrypha. It was, however, entirely worth the wait.

I'm not sure I believed that Valente was capable of improving on the already-stellar work in Apocrypha, but there are pieces here that do so. While there's nothing in the book that falls short of the standard Valente set for herself in that last book, there are a handful of pieces that transcend even that:

"Hades is a place I know in Ohio,
at the bottom of a long, black stair
winding down I-76 from Pennsylvania,
winding down the weeds
through the September damp
and that old tangled root system
of asphalt and asphodel,
to the ash-fields,
clotted with fallen acorns
like rain puddled in fibrous pools."
("The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest")

Anyone can make a person who's already seen something see it again in his mind. The point of poetry is to make someone who hasn't already seen it have a similar experience (similar because, as we all know, no two perceptions of a given even are identical, depending on the baggage, the mood, perhaps even the amount of caffeine extant in the system each reader brings to the table). That's how it's supposed to work in a really good book of poetry.

The title of the book implies retellings of old folktales, perhaps, in the vein one would find in the work of Angela Carter, Wendy Walker, or a number of other (and somewhat less accomplished than those twin doyennes of the modern form) retellers who have emerged in the past few years. And to be sure, there are fragments of tales here that you might recognize. But Valente knows, somewhere deep in her bones, that all tales are in some way folk tales; it's just that for most tales, the folk haven't appeared yet. And thus it is that personal history can be woven into folk tales (and if it's not personal history in some of these pieces, then I'm even more impressed):

"When they came to visit us last Christmas,
he grumbled about the capitalist dogma
of our spangled ornaments,
our 9 pound turkey glistening like a gold-skinned baby,
our soft mezzo-soprano two-part harmony.
He spat after her when she went to Mass.

I stayed behind
to wash the big turkey plate,
and he leaned against the black kitchen counter,
leering at me like an overseer.
He put his hands over mine in the soapy water,
and they were cold as storms.
He whispered in my ear,
his breath full of low clouds.
("Gringa")

It's not just the confessional poetry that's been in vogue since the fifties, it's something more, something with that slight tang of legend. It says "This is a tale to tell around a campfire after all the children have gone to bed, scared of men with hooks for hands and creeping vines." At this point, I had also planned to quote from the quietly devastating "The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider", the book's most personal piece, but there's no way to give you the full effect of the piece without giving you the whole thing, which is too long for a review. The same could be said, of course, with the two poems referenced above, but I could use pieces to point things out. You won't get the full effect of those until you read them for yourself, and that is something you should do as soon as possible. Valente is a true talent, right up there with America's best working authors--Walker, Koja, Taaffe, a handful of others--and the sooner your discover her gifts, the less you'll have to go back and experience when you inevitably decide to gobble up everything she's already written. *****