“Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly”: Wonderland-referencing poems in Asimov’s Science Fiction

James — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:09:15 +0000

The September 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction hits newsstands today. The two poems in this issue both use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland themes as their central metaphors. “The Now We Almost Inhabit” by Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier uses the Cheshire Cat and Alice’s changing size “as images of changable realities”, and Ruth Berman’s poem “Egg Protection” (mistakenly called “Egg Production” in the table of contents) uses “the pigeon’s opinion of long-necked Alice as a predatory serpent as the opinion of birds in general regarding humans.” (Quotes describing the poems from Ruth Berman.) Here’s an excerpt from “Egg Protection”:

For about two weeks, two robins
Kept yelling at me
Every time I appeared outside the door
In (apparently) a cloud
Of flames and brimstone
Visible to birdseyes,
To grab the paper or the mail.

[...]

Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly,
But I don’t want theirs.
Birds consider only the first bit.
They don’t take a human’s word for the rest.

To read the whole poem, please consider purchasing September’s Asimov’s Science Fiction, where all fine magazines are sold!

Lewis Carroll Society of North America » pigeon

“Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly”: Wonderland-referencing poems in Asimov’s Science Fiction