Zoe Brooks, "Something in Nothing"

 

After many years working with disadvantaged communities in London and Oxford, Zoe Brooks returned to her native Gloucestershire and her first love of writing and performing poetry. Zoe’s long poem for multiple voices Fool’s Paradise won the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition award for best poetry ebook 2013. Her first collection was Owl Unbound (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2020), and Fool’s Paradise (Black Eyes Publishing) was published as a print book in 2022. Something in Nothing was published by Indigo Dreams in Feb 2026. Zoe is director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s Online Programme and assists with the annual In-Cheltenham Festival. She set up and runs the Poetry Events in UK & Ireland Facebook group.

About Something in Nothing, by Zoe Brooks
Something in Nothing is a verse novel, which weaves together the lives of various fairytale characters in a contemporary setting to explore universal issues, in particular the denial of evil – the "something in nothing" of the collection’s title. 

At the heart of the sequence is the story of Bluebeard and the Luminous Girl. Both are based on real individuals. 

Whether it is state terror or the individual evil of a misogynist serial killer, most of us are in denial. It couldn’t happen to us. The man we pass on the street cannot be a murderer. Worse still, we see the danger in the wrong places, fearing those who are different (the stranger), rather than people who are like us.

And if we do see it, how can we speak of it? In order to speak of the unspeakable, this sequence uses fairytale characters:

• Bluebeard is a serial killer of young women, whom he buries in his cellar. 
• The Luminous Girl is a collector of angels and lover of life. A traditional fairytale heroine maybe, but also a modern one.
• The Woman at Number 5 - effectively a fairy godmother to the Luminous Girl without the magic. As a refugee from a totalitarian regime, she recognises the evil that is lurking in plain sight.  
• Baba Yaga - the ubiquitous witch of Slavic folktales with an insatiable appetite for human flesh, which she cooks in an oven from which smoke always rises. A former goddess of death, Baba Yaga is a mass murderer.
• Bluebeard’s wife. True to the original folktale, she is an innocent young woman and likely victim. 
• Beast, another outsider, an elderly monster who is not a monster, Beast is married to Beauty. Beast sees through Bluebeard’s jack-the-lad persona.
• Beauty - Beast’s wife, who unlike the fairytale character is past her prime. She grieves for the child she could not have.
• The young man – an angel out of place and useless in this world of fairytale monsters and characters. He cannot save or even warn the Luminous Girl.  

By using fairy tales, the poems allow us a safe place to peer into the darkness. The poems are elemental and yet personal, out of time and yet terribly current. We are not part of Bluebeard’s and Baba Yaga’s world, but we could be. 

Zoe blogs about her poetry and fairy tales on her website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Something in Nothing

Happy Ever After - A Catechism

What do fairytales teach us? 

That the most dangerous animal is the huntsman. 
That you should never trust strangers.
That you should never trust stepmothers,
(or fathers, or sisters, or grandmothers).

When midnight strikes hurry home.
When a shoe does not fit cut off your toe.
When you cross a bridge do so quickly. 

Don’t rely on breadcrumbs.
Don’t go into the forest.
Don’t eat gingerbread or apples. 

That monsters can be princes in disguise.
That monsters can be monsters. 
That men can be monsters. 
That some men keep their dead wives in the cellar. 

That stories tell the truth.

Apart from at the end. 

 
Bluebeard Likes to Entertain 

Bluebeard likes to entertain
waifs and strays like puppies 
that need drowning.
The sort of women 
that no one will miss –
looking for a sofa or a home
or a man who will listen.

 
Bluebeard charms them
with his culinary skills,
his smile like a trapdoor.

No one notices them in café or street.
They are storm water in the gutter.
Easy come, easy gone, these girls.

But Bluebeard notices.

Ki Russell, "The Wolf at the Door"

 

Ki Russell earned a PhD in Literature with a Creative Writing emphasis from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2012. Since the fall of 2012, she has taught Composition, Creative Writing, and Literature at Blue Mountain Community College in eastern Oregon, where she also serves as department chair of English, Writing, & Philosophy. Ki researches fairy tales and then butchers them for her own uses. She steals time from grading to wrestle with words, converse with the cat, dance with the dog, and paint. She believes people should laugh more.

Ki is active on Facebook here. Other samples of her work can also be found here. 

About The Wolf at the Door

In 2014, Ars Omnia Press released Ki’s hybrid genre novel The Wolf at the Door, which combines fiction and poetry to present the interrupted narrative of Lana, a contemporary revision of the Little Red Riding Hood figure. Each snippet of Lana’s story weaves her life ever more densely and intimately into the weft of a wider world of fairy tale-inspired figures, against which the protagonist’s story unfolds and through which she discovers who and what she is. Interwoven between the sections of this narrative are poems exploring other fairy tale figures, the perspective of these poems alternating between the contemporary and the timeless time of fairy tales. Baba Yaga appears in her hut in the woods and also as a Kali-figure living among us in the suburbs: devouring, monstrous, sexual, divine. She subsequently appears in the fairy tale tavern where she guides the heroine of the disrupted narrative, who works and interacts with other fairy tale figures traditionally cast as villains. Ultimately, Lana must come to recognize her own identity as both the maiden (Red Riding Hood) and the crone (grandmother) which allows her to draw power from both of these extremes of the female archetype.

From The Wolf at the Door, by Ki Russell

How to Become Baba Yaga

Build a log hut and stuff
the cracks with mud, straw,
rags. Twine hair through dirt.
Decorate with skulls.
Sculpt a pair of chicken legs
from river clay and rooster
blood. Place them beneath the floor.
Rig ropes with winches and puppet
your home wherever you please.
Compose chants and curses.
Mumble them as you tug tendons.

Pull your nose to your chin.
Pinch veins until the skin blues
and people miss your eyes.
Hunch your shoulders:
a hill that slopes
to your head. Oil
your hair till it snakes
around your face. Knock out
every other tooth. Sharpen
the rest. You’ll need them to tear
flesh from bones.

Train your palate: melt
flesh on your tongue.
Savor the juice of roast
torso, mop the drippings
with bone-flour bread. Lick
your fingers clean. Pluck lips
from your teeth. Devour
their sins. Gulp
them down. Absolve.

Reflections of a Suburban Witch

I smelled the blood of an Englishman today.
        The old red odor bled through his cologne.
I didn’t mention it. My spice grinder can’t handle bones these days.
        Besides, who has time to bake?

At the office, two emails from the cat:
                                It’s raining and the noise against the window disturbs my nap
                        and later:
                                The dog won’t give up the remote. I expect you to rectify this.

Of course those clumsy gray paws can’t type. 
                                He uses voice command software.
Today’s talking animals don’t bother with rhyme.
        No one repeats what they say.

The house: vinyl-sided wood. 
                                No insurance on gingerbread—who has the money for those 

                        premiums?
The oven is electric, small.
                                It lacks flare, but it’s safer when the kids get pushy. 

Teika Marija Smits, "Russian Doll"

Teika Marija Smits is a writer, freelance editor and mother-of-two. She writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her writing is heavily inspired by motherhood, mythology, fairy tales and folklore, and has appeared in a variety of places including Atrium, Brittle Star, LossLit, Prole, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Shed, Mslexia, Literary Mama, Shoreline of Infinity, Best of British Science Fiction 2018 and Enchanted Conversation. The former managing editor of Mother’s Milk Books, she is now an Editor-at-Large at Valley Press alongside running The Book Stewards – a writers’ support site that she manages with her husband. In spare moments she likes to doodle, draw and paint. She is delighted by the fact that ‘Teika’ means fairy tale in Latvian. Teika is on Twitter @MarijaSmits and her website is: https://teikamarijasmits.com/

About Russian Doll

The poems of Russian Doll tell a story of metamorphosis and becoming. Charting the ever-shifting terrain of selfhood, they speak of the joys and challenges of being both daughter and mother; schoolgirl and middle-aged woman; and detail the many ways in which the stories of our lives are as multicoloured and multilayered as a Russian doll. 

From Russian Doll

Shades of Red

Once an actress, my Muscovite mother 
knew how to make an entrance. 
Striking in fuchsia 
she’d arrive late
to my school performance, 
call my name. Wave.
Have trouble finding her seat.
 
I’d glow crimson
and turn into the smallest
version of myself –
the littlest Russian doll,   
the one most easily lost; 
almost, but not quite, 
invisible. 

Treasure

Curiosity, and a sudden thirst for savagery,
makes her split open the matryoshka –
pop pop pop pop pop –
until ah!
how satisfying, 
the baby doll rests snug in her palms.