Author Margaret Yocom to read poetry at DDG Booksellers on June 28

FARMINGTON – In her new book, Margaret Yocom of Farmington and Rangeley asks, “What would the heroine of this controversial tale say if she could tell her own story?” And so begins ALL KINDS OF FUR: Erasure Poems & New Translation of a Tale from the Brothers Grimm, published by Deerbrook Editions of Cumberland.

Yocom will be at DDG Booksellers on June 28 at 6:30 p.m. to read from her new book.

In these poems, Yocom offers a new vision of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s “All Kinds Of Fur,” a little-known version of “Cinderella” that rarely appears in fairy tale collections since it opens with a widowed father who demands to marry his daughter. Wearing a mantle of rough furs, the heroine flees from the dangers at home into the forest where she meets a neighboring king’s hunters who take her to the castle kitchen. She toils there for years, until she hears the music of that first ball.

Using the contemporary poetic practice of erasure, Yocom “erases” some of the Grimms’ words by changing their font color to gray. The remaining words in black form the new poems that reveal the young woman’s own story of how she journeyed to a new, full life. The book includes an afterword where Yocom discusses the tale, her translation of it and her erasure writing process.

As a folklorist, poet, and storyteller, Yocom has been mesmerized by this Grimm Brothers’ tale for decades, teaching it to her university students and telling it to adult audiences. She began writing the erasure poems in 2007.

“This immense tale,” Yocom said, “asks us what it is to be human, what it is like to live in a skin that we feel is not our own. As I wrote these poems, my major challenge was discovering how to end All Kinds Of Fur’s story. I knew the young woman whose voice I was uncovering would not be satisfied with marriage alone. As a survivor of abuse, she would need to realize something profound that could help her rebuild her life.”

Deerbrook Editions also thought ALL KINDS OF FUR’s story needed to be told.

“Rarely do you find a new translation of a source text—here, the Grimms’ tale—which, because of its scholarship, merits publication by itself,” said Jeff Haste. “Also, readers will get a unique experience reading this book of erasure poetry, since they can see both its source text and its erasure poems. And then, there is a creative challenge of designing an avant-garde book.”

Yocom’s book is already garnering praise. “In her poems,” Dan Beachy-Quick of Colorado State University said, “Margaret Yocom shows us that a text has its own hidden inner life, that beneath every depth, there is a deeper deep; and beneath every dark, a darker dark. It is in this dark that ALL KINDS OF FUR teaches us to see.”