Emily Pérez’s House of Sugar, House of Stone weaves Grimm’s Fairy Tales into the business of modern life—laptops and late nights with sleepless children—to explore an undercurrent of terror about living in a family. These poems slip between the worlds of the wolf-haunted forest and the harried house of the contemporary artist/parent, until the two blend and bleed into each other. Children learn not to trust their parents, while simultaneously yearning to win back their affections. Parents similarly question their own trustworthiness as protectors. They are devoured by children, which leaves them equally apt to dismember a lion to protect their young as they are to leave those children alone in the woods. These musical, emotionally ruthless pieces occasionally find respite, but Perez reminds us that despite our best efforts to map our way to safety: “Either way / you’re lost. Either way / you’ll wander into deeper woods.”

Emily Pérez is the author of Backyard Migration Route and a recipient of grants and scholarships from the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Summer Literary Seminars, and Inprint, Houston. She is a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and her poems have appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, Borderlands, and DIAGRAM. She teaches English in Denver, where she lives with her husband and sons.