Where the Wolf takes classic horror and dark fantasy imagery, including fairy tale imagery, and creates a narrative about a young girl becoming a woman becoming a mother, and how she uses the werewolf or fairy tale wolf imagery to convey that change and the protection she needed while going through those changes. She uses the wolf image as a metaphor for adaption, change, and even survival:
I say wolf but I mean gown of changed night:
forecast of bones falling from the rooks’ tongues, the weight of a hundred skies inside.
In tapping into this imagery, she takes a classic monster or villain from the tales and reinvents it as an icon of womanhood. This is something that Kindred is known for doing, taking known characters from fantasy or fairy tales and giving them new, unheard, voices to powerful effect, and Where the Wolf is no exception.
Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of Where the Wolf, a winner of the Diode Editions Book Prize, forthcoming in 2021, Book of Asters (Mayapple Press, 2014) and No Eden (Mayapple Press, 2011). Her chapbooks are Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018), and Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). She has received two Individual Artist Awards in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She teaches writing online for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.
