Vellum Leaves & Lettered Skins by Colleen Anderson
Raw Dog Screaming Press (July 29, 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Colleen Anderson is a Canadian author writing fiction and poetry and has had two collections and over 300 poems published in such venues as Grievous Angel, Polu Texni, The Future Fire, HWA Poetry Showcase and many others. She is a member of HWA and SFPA and a Canada Council grant recipient for writing. She has performed her work before audiences in the US, UK and Canada and has placed in the Balticon, Rannu, Crucible and Wax poetry competitions. Colleen also enjoys editing and co-edited Canadian anthologies Playground of Lost Toys (Aurora nominated) and Tesseracts 17, and her solo anthology Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland was published by Exile Books. She has served on both Stoker Award and British Fantasy Award juries, and guest-edited Eye to the Telescope. Her latest collection of poetry is Vellum Leaves and Lettered Skins.
Vellum Leaves & Lettered Skins is, at its core, a retelling of the Rapunzel myth. Anderson infuses it with other folktales, such as Basille’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” and Rumpelstiltskin, as well as historical figures and buildings, such as Lady Godiva or the cloigthithe of Ireland. While Anderson doesn’t add anything truly new to the various iterations of the tale, folks only familiar with the more common Grimm variant of the tale or the recent animated film will find Anderson’s take unique and refreshing.
When the poems in this collection use the literary devices one would expect from a poetry collection (imagery, metaphor, meter, etc.), the poems are effective and tight. For example, these opening lines
Consider me a flower, a tree
a sacred fruit
some days, I am petals floating
others, in bloom burgeoning
smothering perfumeThe day is honey-heavy with bees
sleep strokes my eyes in hazy heat
I doze and drone, abuzz with humming desires
until I hear: Rapunzel. Rapunzel.
Reading poems like these, it’s clear that Anderson knows her craft and prosody. The sounds that resonate though out this poem– — alveolar fricatives dancing with long o and long e vowels — create a sonorous pleasure for the readers, lulling them in the very dozy feeling of the speaker. This is poetry doing what it’s supposed to do: affecting the reader physically while the words affect them intellectually. When Anderson allows her skill to show through, the poems are rich and successful.
Unfortunately, the collection is uneven, and many of the poems seem like filler. One gets a sense, both from reading the introduction to the collection as well as the end material, that this book was intended, originally, to be a much shorter project than its current iteration. Many of the poems seem to summarize previous poems, adding little to the collection beyond page length. Take, for example, poem “Full Circle,” which begins:
I am back where I began
was it all for nothing
I am empty, a circle round
unfilled sphere
These sorts of abstract lines read more like pop lyrics than poetry, and when held up against the standards that Anderson set for herself in other poems, read as weak and uncurated.
Overall, fans of horror poetry will probably find something to enjoy in this collection. Anderson is a talented poet whose mastery of craft and language shows through on many of these poems when she lets it. While the collection is uneven, there is enough here that readers of horror poetry will not be disappointed.
