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Open Books: Events
April 29, 2010 07:30 PM
LANA HECHTMAN AYERS & LORRAINE HEALY
The relationship of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf is cast in a new light in Lana Hechtman Ayers' chapbook What Big Teeth: Red Riding Hood’s Real Life, published by Kissena Park Press. The poems bring a contemporary psychological and carnal edge to the tale, the red of that famous cloak becoming an emblem of desire and rebellion -- "The first story is not about light or apples. / The first story is about the woods, / the woman in the red hood, the wolf.... / He will tear you apart if you do not stop him. // Do not stop him. / How else to transform?"
Born in Argentina, Lorraine Healy came into adulthood there during that country's dark recent history, and many of the poems in her new collection, The Habit of Buenos Aires, (Tebot Bach) rise from that experience. David St. John has praised her "muscular and immediate poems… that form a spiritual and political accounting." "I went from thirteen to eighteen / eating the white sour bread of lie," she writes, "...we awoke and were so heavy / with the black-green years. So much mud / to go through, sifting for little things, / an earring, one of the wrist bones, a name."
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