A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects by Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente’s A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects from Norilana Books collects about two dozen poems, most of them previously published in various print and online venues. The poems largely draw from mythology and fairy tales. Interspersed among them are very short prose pieces, each labeled as being a particular tale type, which gives them a sort of archetypal weight (or at least a claim to such) even before they begin.

“The Inkmaker’s Wife” is a stand-out poem itself as well as a good representative of many of the poems here. In it, the woman of the title observes the way her husband’s work has taken over their house, filling up all manner of containers, including “my grandmother’s gold-speckled urn, / her ashes having long been packed into a tea box.”* From the details of his work, she moves on to the affect it has on her body:

… Slashes of squid-brume
criss-cross my throat like migrations,
and my navel catches its share of sweat pigment

In the end, however, there is an escape for her, not literal but in the hints of some kind of secret knowledge she has from him:

Naked, I am written—but the ink is not his,
nor the marrow-alphabet. The cuttlefish trace
their glottals on the cave-walls of my ribs…

Many of the poems follow a similar pattern. In “The Inkmaker’s Wife,” the woman could be from today or hundreds of years ago, but her lack of a name or label except as a wife and the nature of the husband’s craft give it something of a fairy-tale quality. Often the women of these poems are explicitly drawn from folk tales and mythology, ranging from Eve of Biblical origin to Pasiphae and Helen of Greek myth to Sita of the Ramayana and even the Queen of Hearts. In others, they are not so clearly labeled but still have a feel of inhabiting a fairy-tale world.

Husbands invariably bind these women, some maliciously so while others do so from a misguided sense of protecting them. Wives are planted in their houses, are walled or locked into their places. The release from this is often a more literal escape than in “The Inkmaker’s Wife,” while in other poems, the ending leaves that release either ambiguous or tragic.

Several poems that don’t fit this pattern also deserve mention. “The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest,” for example, juxtaposes the myth of Persephone and Hades with the narrator’s own move from California to Ohio. It begins, “Hades is a place I know in Ohio, / at the bottom of a long, black stair.” The result of this overlay, the way the modern world and the myth play off each other, creates a poem that resonates.

Similarly, in the ambitious poem, “The Seven Devils of Central California,” Valente presents in each of seven sections a different tragic aspect of California’s past and present—things like diverted rivers and imported brides—each personified as a devil. Or rather, the devil is in the denial that the rest of the world gives these truths. In “The Devil of Mine Canaries,” for example:

Who remembers where they got the songbirds?
Bought from Mexico, from Baja with shores
like sighs? …

But:

I deny you, says the buried mine, long stopped up.
I deny you, say the crows, too big to tame.
I deny you, says the miner, a new bird swinging at his side like a lunchbox.

“The Child Bride of the Lost City of Ubar” and “The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider” are two more that I found especially memorable. And one last poem that needs mention is “Notes Left by a Previous Tenant.” It is not speculative, but it achieves an understated beauty reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s poems in the back and forth between the notes of the title and the interpretations given by the new tenant. “You must feel it,” the poem concludes, “the heat / of skin that is gone.”

The danger in any single-author collection is that the works will fall into a sense of sameness, and the reader become dulled to them. This hazard is magnified in a collection of such short works, so the scattered prose pieces break up the book nicely. Even with them, there were times the collection felt stuck in a repetitive mode…but I wouldn’t consider that a criticism so much as a recognition of how a reviewer must read a book. I suspect most readers will not pick it up and read it from cover to cover but rather jump around as the desire strikes them in between other books and stories.

The stories are tied together in that each is presented as a gathered folk tale, one variation on what may be a common story in a particular region. Typically, these are stories that are supposedly only told under very specific conditions—sister to sister, an old woman on her deathbed to female relatives, the youngest girl of a family to other children. This gives an enjoyable meta-fictional layer to the tales, allowing them to work as stories themselves but also as a look at and celebration of how stories are passed.

Thematically, the stories often mirror the themes of the poems, telling of women who are trapped by lovers or bound by husbands. One especially powerful one is “Tale Type 10,441: The Woman Who Married the Land,” in which the women of a region of the Canadian prairies stay in their houses. The woman of the title, after her children have left and her youthful cleverness has faded, plants her feet into the ground beneath her house, and they grow roots until they touch another woman’s roots. It’s a wonderful image of connection and solidarity despite hardships.

In “Tale Type 5513A-Z: Blood Tales,” a desert people only understand stories that include blood. In “Tale Type -17: The Courtship of Heaven and Earth,” prospective brides tell their suitors the story of Lady Almond who marries and then leaves three husbands to finally find rest with a deathlike King Tobacco. The suitor’s reaction to her variation on the story determines her esteem for him. And in “Tale Type 17894: The Stalwart Historian”—for me the most memorable and powerful of these little pieces—the books in a library tell the story of woman who becomes entangled in a library-forest, searching for a fabled fruit.

These pieces create images. Their briefness means they are not centered on detailed plots or well-defined characters. But the images they create, as with the images in minimalist and other short poetry, are images that can inspire a reader to wonder, to imagine at broader themes and ideas.

This is undeniably a feminist work. The theme of many different women in very similar situations where the men in their lives have bound them in some way fits perfectly with the title of the collection. These are fragile dialects, to be sure, and in need of being listened to. A few months ago, in a review I praised Carolyn Ives Gilman’s collection Aliens of the Heart as feminist works that simply begin with the assumption that their women protagonists are worthy of being the focus of a story that will appeal to every reader, regardless of gender. Cumulatively, the effect here is not the same. As the count of cruel and malicious men rises, it becomes more difficult for a male reader to remain engaged with the poems and prose, and I began to wonder if there might not be men also who speak with fragile dialects.

Yet I believe that comes back again to the difference between reading for pleasure and for review—on an individual level, these poems and prose pieces do not exclude any reader. They might challenge some, and they certainly offer encouragement to those who themselves feel fragile in this way. And most importantly, they abound in powerful images that are not fragile in the least.

*All quotations from an uncorrected Advanced Reader Copy

Publisher: Norilana Books (May 2008)
Price: $22.95
Trade paperback: 180 pages
ISBN: 1934648345