I Dreamed A World

by Colleen Anderson

A collection of 60 poems viewing fairy tales, myths, witches and more from the female perspective. This collection includes Snow White's Apples, The Looking Glass, and Cinderella's Pumpkin from a second collection focused around fantasy and fairy tale objects.

158 pages, Hardcover

Published May 31, 2022

About the author

Colleen Anderson writes fiction, dark fiction, erotica, poetry, SF, fantasy, and anything of interest. She has a BFA in Creative Writing and freelances as a copyeditor and proofreader. Her works have been nominated for multiple awards: Elgin, Rhysling, Dwarf Stars, Pushcart, Aurora. As well, her works have been shortlisted for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, the Friends of Merril short fiction contest, the SFPA poetry contest, and placed in the Rannu competition, Balticon poetry contest and Crucible. Colleen also won the Jerry Jazz Musician short story contest and has received several honorable mentions in the Year's Best SF, Year's Best Horror and Fantasy, and the Writers of the Future.

She is a member of the HWA and SFPA and is the current president of the SFPA helping to promote speculative poetry for all readers and writers. She co-edited Tesseracts 17 with East Coast, dark fiction writer Steve Vernon, Playground of Lost Toys with Ontario, award-winning author Ursula Pflug, and edited Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland.

A recipient of the Ladies of Horror Fiction, Canada Council and BC Arts Council grants in writing, she has published over 300 pieces of fiction and poetry. You can find some of her works online at Polu Texni, Polar Borealis, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Radon Journal and many others, as well as her short fiction collections Embers Amongst the Fallen, and A Body of Work (Black Shuck) through Amazon. She is the author of two poetry collections as well; I Dreamed a World (LVP), 2022, and The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams (Yuriko Publishing), 2023, also available through Amazon

Colleen has served on several juries for the Bram Stoker awards and the British Fantasy Awards as well as on the HWA Scholarship Committee. www.colleenanderson.wordpress.com

Reviews

[Jeffrey Caston]

I bought this book not knowing it was poetry. (That's on me.) I don't really read poetry often. Candidly I rarely understand it... also on me.

But I wanted to try this nonetheless because I like the publisher and I was up for trying to expand my horizons. I was intrigued by the theme of a poetry collection that retells or riffs on or expands upon fairy tales, mythos, fantasy and stories, which as the back cover puts it, "through a feminist lens."

I'm going to avoid a rating because, again, candidly, I didn't really understand the vast majority if them.

BUT...

There were two poems that (1) got through my thick skull; and (2) I enjoyed reading. The first was "Rapunzel and Medusa," which was a meeting of the minds and lives of those two fairy tale/mythological figures. I was touched by their extremes, yet not extreme. The other one was "What Goldilocks Learned," which was a clever re-imagining/take on Goldilocks having to suffer through the relationship of three different men and even as to the one who was "just right," he still wasn't particularly satisfying. I found that one quite entertaining. If I were judging this book strictly on those two poems, this collection would be 4 stars. But there's like 60 poems in this book. With so many I didn't know how to interpret (again my fault, not the author's) I can't really feel right about giving this book an overall rating.

BUT...AGAIN...

I recommend this. There's bound to be way more savvy and poetry-centric readers who would love to see this. Even I could tell there was a lot of creativity in here.

[Melissa]

An enjoyable journey through 60 poems centered in fairy and folk figures and tales. I particularly enjoyed the witches!