Story Hour takes many well-known fairy tales - "Jack and the Beanstalk," "Beauty and the Beast," "Little Red Riding Hood" - and turns them on end. In her poems, Sara Henderson Hay asks us to feel compassion for "the murdered Giant," to believe that the grandmother might even invite the wolf in and offer him "a warm bed, and a bone or two." Hay's adept voice makes these familiar stories at times funny, always ironic, and, as Miller Williams writes in the foreword to this new version, "even scarier than they were." Whether these sonnets bring to the surface a joke we hadn't imagined or quicken our memory to a darkness only hinted at before, they always invite us to go back into what Miller Williams calls "these old houses we thought we knew so well."

Contents

• Story Hour
• Sequel
• The Grandmother
• I Remember Mama
• The Dragon
• The Sleeper 1 (She speaks...)
• The Sleeper 2 (He speaks...)
• Photograph Album
• The Lost Ones
• The Builders
• The Marriage
• Only Son
• The Grievance
• The Name
• The Bird's Nest
• The Dog
• The Worrier
• Rapunzel
• Winter's Tale
• One of the Seven Has Somewhat to Say
• The Memory
• Our Town: Police Docket
• Death of H.D., A Prominent Citizen
• Local Boy Makes Good
• Letter to the Town Council
• Juvenile Court
• Syndicated Column
• Dr. Sööö Advises a Worried Mother
• The Investigator
• Housewife
• Fairy Godmother
• Interview
• The Witch
• Message to the Vigilantes
• The Flaw
• New England Tragedy
• The Goosegirl
• The Princess
• The Bad Fairy
• The Benefactors
• The Formula