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A hybrid-genre carnivalesque of trauma and rebirth, Fablesque harnesses the power of old tales to dispel the disenchantments of women and animals in the #MeToo era. Told in three acts, the first section comprises a bestiary blending fiction and myth; and personal essay, prose poem, and verse to speak to the reverberations of colonialist violence and war on the Korean peninsula long after the initial events. Section two meditates on places local (Seattle’s Ballard Locks) and otherworldly (the Moon) from to deliver the perspectives of creatures small (a lunar dog) and mighty (Hello Kitty) as they contemplate planet Earth. The final section channels the voices of beasts and women in experimental sonnets to speak to the peculiarities of our time, as we speed toward apocalypse in a corrupt and dying empire.
Harnessing folktale, fairy tale, and collage, the poems embrace constraint as a starting point for liberating new content and for addressing constructions and intersections of gender, race, power, and time. The collection embraces the great feminist tradition of retelling old tales to imbue them with female subjectivity, speaking to the thoughts, desires, and outrage of contemporary American women.
Praise For…
“Anna Maria Hong is a genius poet of fairytale language and conventions. In Fablesque, Hong explores the grammar of horror and hunger, survival and abuse across the contorted historical, cultural, and familial terrains of the Korean diaspora. Fablesque speaks an unflinching language, the language of translation, the translation of unspeakable historical and personal tragedy.”
—Don Mee Choi
“Anna Maria Hong has built a cage, a bestiary, a chamber, a barn, a Fablesque book with breathtaking and very strange grace. These poems are haunted by fairy tales, awakened to history, apprehensive about gender, and most of all kind. Hong has a rhythmic and talented soul. This new collection cements her status as an important 21st century feminist fabulist.”
—Kate Bernheimer
Anna Maria Hong is the author of three recent books: Age of Glass, winner of the
Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry
Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, the novella H & G, winner of the A
Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Fablesque, which won
Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study, she has poetry and fiction published and forthcoming in The Nation,
The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Shenandoah, Colorado Review, jubilat, Ecotone, Poetry
Daily, and The Best American Poetry. She is an Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke
College.
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