Writing

Poetry

Two of Maureen's poems have recently been featured in the News & Observer. They are viewable: here (newer) and here.

After the Fairy Tale

Cover Art

Sample Selection

Sleeping Beauty in Old Age

Reviewer's Comments

This collection combines the appeal of archetype and the charm of wit with a great dose of wisdom. Sherbondy's characters, a familiar lot of fairytale and beloved heroes and heroines, are navigated through the straits of reality by an ironic and gentle presence. The lessons learned from these poems are not unlike those learned from the fairytales: Snow White still finds that you can't take anything at face value, but instead of confronting this painful truth through the vehicle of the shiny apple, she ends up at Planned Parenthood because her prince has no health insurance. Sherbondy's poems are filled with subtle and pleasurable music, complementing the twist of beloved narrative into resonant truths.

-- Patty Seyburn, author of Diasporadic and Mechanical Cluster

Following the metamorphic tradition of Anne Sexton?s Transformations, the poems in After the Fairy Tale update the hitherto fictively blessed lives of personages (ranging from Snow White and Alice in Wonderland, to Dorothy Gale of Wizard of Oz fame), placing them in our own time in which the mundane is heroically tragic and psychic survival miraculous. Maureen Sherbondy has created emotionally sly and ironically precise poems that show that the magic beanstock is rooted in flat dull earth; the characters who have spent ?the better? part of their lives in worlds of mystery and wonder have now returned to reality. That reality is unmistakably our own.

-- Steven B. Katz, poet, and Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, Clemson University.

There's a reason we call them fairy tales. Maureen Sherbondy's poems show Snow White, Cinderella, and others mixed unhappily into modernity. Displaced and disillusioned, our childhood champions yearn for passion, endure the tedium of suburbia, and age awkwardly into nursing homes. Even their dreams don't satisfy. Fancifully realistic, these poems revisit old friends with humor, pathos, and hard truths for us all.

-- Kenneth Chamlee, I. B. Seese Distinguished Service Professor of English and Creative Writing, Brevard College

 

Have you ever wondered what happens to all the people in those fairytales that end: and they lived happily ever after? Well, Maureen Sherbondy, in After the Fairy Tale, is more than happy to bring you up to date on the lives of all the favorite valient men and beautiful women you memorized growing up, hoping that your life would be just like theirs. Forget happily ever after. Welcome to Reality Fairytales.

Sherbondy brilliantly plays out the on-going stories in powerful poetry, carefully crafting the recent turn of events in our characters' lives, never wavering in her extended fairytale metaphors. Isolation, anger, resignation, hot flashes and the Wizard of Oz as cranky politician unfold as the pages and stories turn in ways that are, yes, enchanting as well as thought-provoking.

Sherbondy adds her take on the true outcomes of fairytales to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Ann Sexton and the various works of Margaret Atwood, both in poetry and prose (to name just two of the many compelled to take on this task of following up on the details). Sherbondy's poems serve as cautionary tales about being careful what you wish for. Bedtime stories will never be the same again.

-- Tammy Vitale, an artist and author of the poetry book Shift

 

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