Serpent and Stone

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.