Silent Girls in Fairy Tales: Against the Grain of Violence.

The poems selected here explore the hidden side of some of the most popular fairy tales. Girls become women guided by myths that define their passive role, their submission to violent behavior by men in their lives, be they fathers, husbands, or lovers. These poems look at a girl's fantasies from a different perspective: that a woman's life becomes the work of demystifying the myths that dominated her childhood to create a newly informed and subversive version of the myth.