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Story Hour
Contributor(s): Hay, Sara Henderson (Author)
ISBN: 155728542X     ISBN-13: 9781557285423
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
OUR PRICE:   $18.00  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: July 1998
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Annotation: Originally published by Doubleday (1963) and in 1982 by the University of Arkansas Press, Story Hour takes many well-known fairy tales -- Jack and the Beanstalk, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood -- and turns them on end. In this collection of poems, Sara Henderson Hay asks us to feel compassion for "the murdered Giant"; to believe that the grandmother might even invite the wolf in and offer him "a warm bed, and a bone or two"; and to walk along dark streets with a young man who has escaped the hard life inside the shoe but not his mother's reach. Hay's deft and efficient voice makes these familiar stories at times funny, always ironic, and, as Miller Williams writes in the foreword to this new version, "even scarier than they were."

Hay manages the unexpected points of view in these poems through the sonnet. Using the turn, the shift in rhetoric on which the sonnet relies, she establishes and subtly undermines our notions of the fairy tales before giving us a completely new sense of them, sometimes more compassionate than they once were. Beauty, married to the new Prince, "thought of the good Beast, who used to walk / Beside her in the garden, and who had / Such gentle eyes, and such a loving arm / To shield her from the briers, and keep her warm."

Whether these poems bring to the surface a joke we hadn't darkness only hinted at before, they always invite imagined, or quicken our memory to the us to go back into what Miller Williams calls "these old houses we thought we knew so well."

Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American - General
- Poetry | Women Authors
Dewey: 811.52
LCCN: 98013813
Physical Information: 0.26" H x 5.6" W x 8.52" (0.26 lbs) 53 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
In Story Hour, Hay takes many well-known--"Jack and the Beanstalk," "Beauty and the Beast," "Little Red Riding Hood"--and turns them on end. Whether quickening our memory to the darkness only hinted at before or highlighting the great joke we never caught, her poems always invite us back into what Miller Williams calls "these old houses we thought we know so well."