Red Riding Hood's Sister

Error leads to error in Red Riding Hood’s Sister, as a girl in love finds her marriage has turned violent. The poems in this collection use myth and fairy tale, dream, the fantastic mixed with the everyday, to tell the story of a girl not so different from anyone else who finds herself in a desperate situation. Buckling under emotional abuse and in danger, she struggles to save a relationship that has good in it as well as trauma. Eventually she springs the trap, finds her way out. Why does she ignore the warning signs? why does she stay? what does it take to leave and to heal? The poet draws on her own life as she makes sense of abusive marriage. As she tells the story she learns to see her young self in a kinder light—braver than she had thought, deeper than she had thought, on a journey that led through a dark forest. “Hear me, hear me,” she whispers to the girl. “I am only beginning to understand.”