Chapbook Review: Bewildered
/Are you afraid of the woods? In this Hansel & Gretel reimagining, Jessie Ulmer guides us down a trail of breadcrumbs and pebbles through a literary exploration of trauma, family, and the subjectivity of truth and fiction.
Fairy tales are, by definition, familiar. There must be a reason we’ve been telling the same stories laced with beasts and curses for more than three hundred years, something in these seemingly simple narratives that speaks to the core of our humanity. These timeworn tales can be both comforting and cautionary, sparking our childhood nostalgia as we pass them to the next generation--but they’re also a sharp example of the way stories can be warped and changed over time, whether on purpose or through the natural erosion and evolution of language. Perhaps fairy tales are meant to change, to become something new, to be reborn with each telling. Perhaps this is why they provide such a ripe ground for critique and reimagination.
Jessie Ulmer’s debut chapbook, Bewildered, takes us straight into the thick and murky depths of this space between old and new, recognizable and unexpected. Bewildered is a collection of poetry and prose based on the Grimm tale of Hansel and Gretel, gathering together several perspectives: the jaded older sister, Gretel; the naive younger brother, Hansel; the desperate father who abandoned them; the possibly evil witch who coaxes them toward their doom; and the omniscient storyteller who oversees their tangled lives. But it’s far from a straightforward narrative--these voices overlap from different times and places and realities, making it difficult to decipher what is real and what is imagined. Indeed, we are led to believe that it is all both real and imagined; that these diverging tales can coexist in one universe, and that maybe what is true is not the point at all.
Perhaps Gretel and the witch fall in love. Perhaps Gretel is the witch, or willingly becomes her. Perhaps none of them survived, and perhaps all of them did. You can search for the line within it all, the threads that weave the scattered narrative together, or you can accept each piece as a fractal fragment of a whole, a different angle on a story that’s been told and retold so much as to break into smaller bits each time it is spoken.
Whichever path you choose to follow, Ulmer’s version of this story leads you to ask bigger questions as well, to confront monsters that are scarier than a woman in the woods with a house made of candy. We get a few glimpses into the children’s life before the forest: did their parents lose them out of spite, or truly believe it was their only choice? We’re shown different futures they might have upon returning to civilization, depending on how kind the villagers are, how giving or judgmental. And perhaps most chillingly, we’re asked to sit with this fairy tale as a metaphor for trauma, giving voice to the dark places inside many of us that have the power to turn our truths inside out. With Gretel’s journey in particular, we witness the horror of becoming what has been done to you, of losing all safe paths back to yourself. Ulmer handles these intense subjects with skill and sensitivity, drawing out the original tale’s crueler details in order to complicate the meaning of a forest whose shadows haunt you even after you’ve escaped.
“Water to wine. Blood to flesh. It’s all the same story, in the end. Sometimes you build a religion on it. Sometimes you build a home.”
Let’s be honest: this collection is not for the faint of heart. If you’re fascinated by decay, if you love a story with claws and teeth, you’ll feel right at home in Ulmer’s darkly magical world. There are elements of blood and gore, body horror, and cannibalism, but none of it is gross for the sake of grossness alone; the horror deepens the stakes, bringing us closer to the characters and their ever-ripening wounds. To read this book is to walk alongside Hansel and Gretel in the impossible woods, to hold their hands and eat their crumbs and understand the fierce desperation that has torn at their bones and blood.
With rich fantastical elements, familiar details turned delightfully on their head, and several unique explorations of form--blackout poems and recipe poems sit alongside irreverent monologues and old-timey narration--Bewildered is an alluring hybrid collection that complicates the well-worn tales we’ve heard all our lives and asks us to interrogate them, not just as story, but as a body for the nightmares we’ve faced. Ulmer’s voice is strong and skillful, balancing the grime and gore with a tongue-in-cheek irreverence that makes it easy to keep turning the page. This chapbook is the perfect bedtime story for any fan of horror and mythology, or anyone who’s ever wondered who exactly is hiding in those deep, dark woods anyway.
Bewildered is a debut chapbook from Sword & Kettle Press, a self-described feminist speculative press dedicated to uplifting diverse perspectives and creators. They’re currently fundraising for this project on Kickstarter, and you can further support them by checking out their website or following them on social media (@swordandkettle on Twitter & Instagram). Don’t forget to also check out their Cup & Dagger series of handbound mini-chapbooks spanning a diverse spectrum of genres and forms! We’ve genuinely loved every publication of theirs we’ve been lucky enough to get our hands on.
Jessie Ulmer is a queer writer and editor with a fondness for magic. She loves ghosts and anything wild and eerie, often using elements of the unreal to heighten themes of representation within her work. She is delighted to edit for Sword & Kettle Press, and has been published in Syntax & Salt, Gingerbread House, 3Elements Review, Pins and Needles: A Journal of Contemporary Fairy Tales, The Yellow Chair Review, and Washington’s Best Emerging Poets Anthology. In 2019 she was nominated for a Best of the Net Award. We love Jessie’s creepy yet wholesome aesthetic and her penchant for weaving queer narratives into everything she does!