New Erasure Poems from Deerbrook Editions

CUMBERLAND, Maine - May 8, 2018 - PRLog -- In these poems, Margaret Yocom offers a new vision of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's controversial "Allerleirauh" ("All Kinds Of Fur"), a lesser-known version of "Cinderella" that opens with incest. Erasing the Grimms' words to reveal a young woman's story of her journey to a new, full life, Yocom asks, What would All Kinds Of Fur say if she could tell her own tale? In ALL KINDS OF FUR, the heroine's words rise.

Erasure is a contemporary poetry-writing practice. Poets begin with a source text of any kind and then "erase" selected words and letters, using one or several methods—such as whiting or blacking out their selections, or "ghosting" them with a gray font. What remains are erasure poems.

ALL KINDS OF FUR available now on deerbrookeditions.com. 6 x 9 paperback 80 pages, 17.50; free shipping in the USA. The cover features a painting by Anne Siems.

PRAISE for ALL KINDS OF FUR

Some tales—the old ones, the magical ones—wander the borderlands between our inchoate unconscious and the day-lit logic of our lives, not to keep those realms separate, but to insure something of our dark interiors leaks up into the measured day and, by the trespass,
keeps the fathomless open. Margaret Yocom's book gives us a new translation of one such tale, demonstrating beautifully how it is desire and fear, care and threat, humility and humiliation, love and grief, are entangled in such ways they might be the source of that
knot we call mind. But Yocom does more than give us a tale we've always known even if now we're reading it for the first time. In her erasure of the tale, she shows us that a text, just like our own minds, has its own hidden inner life, and its own unconscious depths, a
mind within the mind, a heart within the heart, a hearth within a hearth. It is a magical and necessary vision, one our culture now, in its incessant surfacing, deeply needs—this reminder, that beneath every depth, there is a deeper deep; and beneath every dark, a darker dark. It is in this dark that ALL KINDS OF FUR teaches us to see.
—Dan Beachy-Quick

These poems are haunted by what Yocom makes invisible by her erasures; what she makes
visible has different bones. T he incest in the fairy tale variously translated as "All Fur" or
"Donkeyskin" shows through the skin without the "s": kin. I have used these poems in my
fairy tale course to introduce students to a tradition whose dark side has been erased, in
other ways, by numerous editors and publishers—and which ALL KINDS OF FUR restores. Are
we not all, like these fairy tale beings, humanimals?

—Katharine Young

* Summary of the Grimms' tale:   "All Kinds Of Fur" tells of a princess whose widowed father develops a strong, carnal desire for her. She looks just like her dead mother, he explains, and, after all, her mother forbade him to marry unless he found someone who looked exactly like her. The princess gives her father four impossible tasks:  bring three gowns and a mantle stitched of a piece of fur from each animal in their kingdom. These tasks, alas, prove only too possible. When her father announces their wedding is the next day, she wraps herself in the mantle, covers her face and hands with ashes, places her gowns and three tiny gold treasures in a nutshell, and escapes into the forest. The neighboring king's huntsmen find her sleeping in the hollow trunk of a tree, call her "All Kinds Of Fur," and take her to the castle kitchen where she labors for years with the cook, until the king, in search of a wife, holds three balls. She disguises herself as a beautiful woman, dances with the king at the balls, and then disappears into the kitchen to make the king's midnight soup. She drops one of her gold treasures in his soup bowl each night. During the last ball, he slips a ring on her finger, follows her, removes her fur mantle, and realizes who she is. They marry.

http://www.deerbrookeditions.com/kin-s-fur/