The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams · Colleen Anderson

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Every legend has another version. Every fairy tale is hiding something. And every dream changes depending on who is doing the dreaming.

In The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams, award-nominated poet Colleen Anderson slips behind the familiar faces of myth, folklore, fairy tale, and fantasy to discover the stories waiting in their shadows.

Gods lose their certainty. Magical objects develop consequences. Monsters acquire motives. Princesses reconsider their happy endings.

Midas questions the price of power. Odin’s ravens refuse to see the world exactly as their master intends. Baba Yaga stalks city streets. Cinderella discovers freedom beyond the palace. Rapunzel and Medusa reach across their separate prisons toward something neither story ever promised them. Even the Tooth Fairy has secrets best left beneath the pillow.

Then a cyclone begins to turn.

Dorothy and the inhabitants of Oz emerge from new angles—stranger, darker, more complicated, and far less obedient to the roles assigned to them. Courage, intelligence, love, innocence, and goodness become slippery things once the old certainties are stripped away.

From ancient gods and enchanted relics to quantum boxes, tarot cards, city streets, technological worlds, and the ever-circling Ouroboros, Anderson uses speculative poetry to collapse the boundary between the fantastic and the familiar.

These are poems for readers who know that stories survive because they change. For readers who have wondered what the monster would say, what happened after happily ever after, whether the gods were ever as wise as they claimed, and whether the strangest mythology of all might be the world we are creating now.

Enter the dream.

Question the legend.

Nothing is quite the way we remember it.

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Colleen Anderson has been widely published across eight countries, with works appearing in publications such as Weird Tales, Vellum Leaves and Lettered Skins as well as two fiction collections A Body of Work and Embers Amongst the Fallen. Colleen freelances as an editor, and has served on British Fantasy Award and Stoker juries. She is the current editor for HWA Poetry Showcase XIII, her fifth poetry collection, To the Last Ion, is coming in 2026. She lives in Vancouver, BC where she searches for mermaids. Visit her at colleenanderson.wordpress.com