Propagation

dancing girl press, 2017

On the first of April, a woman walks into the woods. She’s forty-ish and may be accidentally pregnant. Strangeness ensues.

Propagation riffs on Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, in which he argues that Russian fairy tales have thirty or thirty-one “functions.” Each section of Wheeler’s long poem corresponds to one of those plot twists. As the main character, a woman in crisis, walks away from her ordinary life, time gets slippery. On the looping trail, she flashes back to her own girlhood as trees leaf and a succession of wildflowers bloom. Has a whole month slipped away? What possible futures loom around the bend?

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