Unexplained Fevers
Fairy Tale Heroines, FreedJeannine Hall Gailey's third book,Unexplained Fevers, frees fairy tale heroines from their glass coffins and towers while simultaneously looking at the traps that contemporary women encounter - body image, drug abuse, illness - and how to find power and freedom beyond these limitations. Gailey's trademark wit, charm and energy fill these pages with stories of forests and seascapes, mythical creatures, and the allure of the forbidden."Unexplained Feversplucks the familiar fairy tale heroines and drops  them into alternate landscapes. Unlocking them from the old stories is a way to  "rescue the other half of [their] souls." And so Sleeping Beauty arrives at the  emergency room, Red Riding Hood reaches the car dealership, and Rapunzel goes  wandering in the desert - their journeys, re-imagined in this inventive  collection of poems, produce other dangers, betrayals and nightmares, but also  bring forth great surprise and wonder."- Rigoberto González, author  ofBlack Blossoms"Unexplained Feversbegins with  that most familiar of phrases, "Once upon a time," but the world we find inside  these covers is deeply defamiliarized. Trapped by physical ills, cultural  expectations, and the constraints of marriage, these heroines interrogate the  world and propel themselves through it with cunning and sass. We follow, for  example, Jack and Jill though a prose poem where they "somehow turned thirty  without thunderous applause," after having sworn they "would follow each other  anywhere, but anywhere turned out to be a lot like Ohio." At the center of  these poems - urgent, mysterious, evocative - we find the great topic of all  fairy tales, transformation. ReadUnexplained Fevers, and be transformed."- Beth Ann Fennelly, author ofUnmentionables