Carmen Gimenez Smith

This collection was...interesting. I really liked some poems, especially those dealing with her mother's Alzheimer's disease and modern American consumerism.

In the bulk of these poems, the author just seems angry. Angry at her parents' expectations, at all of the white people around her, at how people treat her, at the US and Americans (even though she is American and has been since birth, though if I understand correctly she does not agree), at everyone not Latinx, at the American show more expectation of women to have no/blonde body hair (yet she uses Madonna as an example of a woman with dark body hair, but being half Italian she is just another white woman). Basically, she just seems very very angry. But is that who she is all of the time, or is that what she was trying to explore in this collection? Is this her anger about how her mother, a Peruvian immigrant, did not get to enjoy the fruits of her labor in this country, instead getting this horrible disease? I have no idea. I have a couple other books of hers, and if I get to them before they are due I may have a better idea.

Also--the author attended San Jose State, probably at the same time my brother was there. show less

Dedicated to Angela Carter, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me is a collection of forty fairy tales written by an impressively wide array of authors, from Neil Gaiman and Jim Shepard to Aimee Bender and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and adapting, reimagining or loosely basing stories on everything from our most traditional fairy tales to mythology to fairy tales from Asia and Japan. Will it surprise you to find out that Joyce Carol Oates chose Bluebeard? Or that John Updike picked the show more same tale, but told it from Bluebeard's point of view and set it in modern Ireland?

In any collection this diverse, some stories are amazing, a few fall flat and a handful are fantastically bizarre. It took me quite a while to read all forty tales, they not being the kind of thing to read one after another. I liked that the editor, Kate Bernheimer, chose several stories by new authors, some of whom have not yet written a full-length novel and others who are not well known. She also included several non-Western authors, who adapted stories from their own countries and made the collection a bit unexpected; without the easy handle of a familiar plot to anchor the reader they demanded a little more of me. My only complaint has to do with the book's organization; with the fairy tale each story is based on found only in the table of contents and information about each author stuck in the back, I was constantly flipping around before and after each story. show less

I read this book in one breathless sitting, and I felt like a changed person after reading it. The lines and perspectives, and the honesty, worm their way into one's mind, and I felt the way I used to feel as an undergraduate, reading works that I wanted to keep near me and slip into my backpack. I'm not a poet, and I don't know what forms she's working in, but it didn't matter; the language was vivid and challenging, but never felt as though she was writing to impress with wordplay. I have show more so many favorites here, including the extended numbered list, "Parts of an Autobiography." She takes on our deepest fears: "I'm a Shitty Parent" and "I'm the Shitty Friend writing valentines. I modify everything." This is gripping, creating the kind of reading experience that danced just beyond my grasp but still spoke to me with honesty and searing intellect. show less

Gah, I hate rating anthologies. How are you supposed to do that? Do you just begin at the top and start substracting half a star for every lame story you find? It seems unfair. So I'm giving this 5 stars because I absolutely love the idea and because there were a more than a few stories in it that were great, either in concept or execution.

It was interesting that the ones I liked the most weren't always the ones inspired in tales I already knew (incidentally, how did I not know about show more target="_top">Catskin? Its retelling is one of the best stories in the book, if only because it's the one that best brings back that dreamlike, suspended feeling of reading classic fairy tales).

Most of the The Wild Swans spinoffs were awesome, but not all of the Bluebeard references were. And I was only meh about both the Snow Queen and The Little Match Girl references, which sucked, seeing as those are probably my favoritest storiestest ever.

I didn't really care though, because half the fun of reading this book comes from working at reaching those conclusions. Tracing back the stories to their sources, pondering where exactly the twist is, carefully sampling the tone and whining at the result? That's what reading metafiction is all about.

Seriously though, there are far more great stories here than I dared to hope. And it also brought back a few tales I didn't even know I remembered, which was a nice bonus. Great fun. show less