Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus - Kristin Abraham

Praise for Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus

In these remarkable and haunting poems, the figure of the child hovers between animal and human, between the socialized world of first persons and an other world, ephemeral, perhaps wild--the world of the tale. Here we sense not only the child's absolute vulnerability, but also her resistance, her refusal: 'My dear, it seems / that to say 'I' is an admission / you don't want to make,' says one speaker to the child. The wolf is here, but as a threat that begins in the child because it is the threat of the adult world that harms by forcing the child to join: 'One choice is to / not talk,' writes Abraham, 'Another / is to participate / in the myth-making.' These poems participate, but by way of careful and beautiful implosion.

~ JULIE CARR

Abraham is a poet who understands the virtue of cutting close to the bone, as well as the dangers inherent in such a practice. After all, she reminds us, 'the more we touch it, the more it spreads.' Here is a poet with 'two reds on the inside,' who is smart enough to recognize that in the slippery realm of feminine defiance, she's both the hunter and the hunted; and who possesses an abundance of wily talent, because in her hands the reader becomes that too.

~ LOUISE MATHIAS