Hannah V. Warren’s [re]construction of the necromancer, one of Sundress Publications’ e-chaps, is the story of a Gretel you’ve certainly never met before. It’s eerie and violent and powerful, a narrative that feels like it’s telling a story a lot deeper and older than this vision of Gretel, thriving about Hansel’s bones.
In her acknowledgement at the end, Warren calls her work “grotesque, speculative poetry.” It’s a damn good description. There is poverty here, deep and profound and desperate: there is abuse, and cannibalism, and a witch who veers between cruel cannibal and tender unmother. It’s a powerful set of images.
It is also a story of change, and loneliness. Gretel changes, again and again, throughout her story. But, at the end, she hovers between spaces and places, a woman and a necromancer: “Instead, I leave the forest / alone, carrying the weight of the dead on my hipbones.”
This is a Gretel forged, in many ways, of despair, and I think her savage poetics are even more profound as we come through the past several awful years. It’s eerie and beautiful and horrifying, and Gretel is a monstrous and powerful woman for our time.
Essentially a Nerd 