Serpent and Stone - by Mari Ellis Dunning & Natalie Ann Holborow (Paperback)

About the Book

Serpent and Stone, a poetry collaboration between Mari Ellis Dunning and Natalie Ann Holborow, gathers women from fairy tale, Greek myth, Shakespeare, biblical narrative, and the Mabinogion into a sequence of dramatic monologues.

Book Synopsis

Serpent and Stone, a poetry collaboration between Mari Ellis Dunning and Natalie Ann Holborow, gathers women from fairy tale, Greek myth, Shakespeare, biblical narrative, and the Mabinogion into a sequence of paired dramatic monologues. The poems function as duets, placing archetypes in conversation: Athena beside Medusa, Belle beside Mrs Potts, Cinderella beside her stepsister. Visceral and sensual, alert to bodily detail and unafraid of the darkly comic, the collection refuses the flattened roles these figures have inherited, voicing rage, desire, weariness and complicity in the same breath. What emerges is a sustained interrogation of how women's stories have been told, and by whom.

Review Quotes

Reimaginings have been done before but it's the scope of curiosity that sets Serpent and Stone apart. Written as a collaborative project, alternative ways of seeing are built into the process. Unsettling as many original fairy tales are, this collection does not look away from the horror. As co-writers confident in their craft, Mari Ellis Dunning and Natalie Ann Holoborow, skilfully weave together the tales of Tinkerbell and Cordelia, offering up the point of view of Shakespeare's Rosaline alongside the musings of an aging Dorothy Gale - it shouldn't work but it does!

- Hanan Issa

A procession of women stepping forward from myth, literature and folktale to have their say in language as many-hued as a carnival and as brazen as a brass-band.

- Matthew Francis