I was pleased for the opportunity to attend several interesting poetry panels at Capricon a few weeks ago, many of which included readings. I looked in my library apps Libby and Hoopla to see who had books available, and I was soon able to check out The Thorn Key: Fairy Tales in Verse (2025), by Jeana Jorgensen.
I had been impressed by the poems I’d heard her read, and I was more impressed when I read dozens of them together. Most of them have disturbing elements as they explore, retell, reinterpret and recast old fairy tales from modern perspectives. Many infer and imply and expand upon abusive elements from those stories, highlighting the struggles of women and queer people in breathtaking and gut-punching ways, but there’s also a lot of survivors and winners and warriors (in their own ways) in these poems, too. They contain a lot of hurting, but that’s leavened by a lot of hope.
It’s not a long collection, containing about 40 poems (some just a few lines, many several e-pages long), a foreword, a list of content warnings/triggers, a fascinating multi-page afterword, and an appendix that lists which fairy tales inspired which poems. I don’t necessarily recommend trying to read all the poems in one go, since that may blunt their edges and impacts, but rather reading a few per day, taking time to savor them.
I read quite a number of them aloud to my partner, and we both really enjoyed the precision and vivid clarity of the language used, hearing what was concisely stated and implied, catching some oblique references, and speculating on a few others where we could tell something cool was happening but we didn’t quite recognize it. We were amazed and appalled (sympathetically) at various insights, sometimes at the same time, in the same lines.
Several fairy tales were revisited from different angles in various poems. It was interesting seeing the multiple treatments of the Cinderella story and the one about the girl with brothers who’d been turned into swans. Sometimes the poems were set in traditional times and tones, sometimes they were told in modern settings, as in “What Happened to the 12th Dancing Princess (Circa 1946)”, and sometimes they were juxtaposed, as in “The Ogre’s Heart”:
“Someday, if some stupid hero doesn’t destroy it first,
the ogre will tenderly lift his heart from the casket
and reinsert it into his chest,
take a deep, shuddering breath
and begin to live once more.
“I lock my storage unit.
I drive away.”
I was dumbstruck by “Walking on Knives,” where The Little Mermaid goes onshore and becomes a professor, with the price of pain but also the condition of sending back information to the sea witch: “… she wants to devour this world’s knowledge / before this world devours ours.” Eventually the former mermaid starts talking to her students:
“That’s when I learn how cruel this world is,
how many of my students bear scars
on their insides, where I imagine
nascent pearls forming
as if they were oysters,
burnishing trauma with beauty.”
Yes, of course, in addition to the fascinating insights revealed throughout this collection, there are moments of gorgeous language, however challenging are the emotions evoked, from wistfulness and uncertainty to pain and fear to fierceness and triumph.
Only one poem, “Bluebeard,” was originally published in 2024. Although it’s good and snappy, I don’t think it’s substantial enough for me to want to nominate it for the special Hugo Awards poetry category this year.
However, the collection is definitely worth checking out. Jorgensen is a scholar who has also published Folklore 101, Fairy Tales 101, and Sex Education 101, and she obviously knows her stuff; she says some really interesting things in her foreword and afterword. But the most compelling reason to read this collection is obviously the poetry itself, which is keenly perceptive, empathetic, and often moving. She’s far from the first person to re-examine fairy tales and folklore from a speculative fiction POV, or to write poetry about it, but if you’re at all interested in the subject, you will be rewarded by reading this.
Content warnings: Abuse, incest, relationship traumas, portrayal of homophobia, pregnancy, substance use, and animal death. Jorgensen lists which poems content which triggers between her Foreword and the actual poems.
Disclaimers: None. (I love libraries!)
