Who deserves a happy ending? How are our futures formed? In retelling the familiar story of the ugly duckling, child in a winter house brightening challenges the assumption that happy endings are inherent in one's make-up, are reached without regard to privilege and community. With a cast of characters and an ever-evolving form, Abigail Zimmer uses this hybrid long poem to rethink how we interpret the world through the stories we tell.

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While Abigail Zimmer's re-visioning the Ugly Duckling fable takes on immediate, bludgeoning proportions for us in the era of Photoshop and selfies, it's her lyrically deft and fragmented approach that allows us to re-see beauty and purpose: "What disrupts can be anything," and indeed Zimmer probes both shape and form with careful quietude here, leading us towards urgent improbabilities—a burning balloon that drifts to the ground, smoking scraps of color, and "the shape of things as they are."
—Susanna Childress, author of ENTERING THE HOUSE OF AWE

There is always the implication that the ugly duckling will grow up to be beautiful. But who decides what is beautiful—or even what, essentially, we are? Playing with a ubiquitous tale of childhood and it's known ending, Abigail Zimmer gives us a "gunned down bird," a sad child who talks back, a small & pretty violence, an expectation that does not cooperate. The grown-ups resent you for being ugly, and worse—love you for being beautiful. Zimmer's child in a winter house brightening is a gorgeous & necessary re-examination of an age-old tale and pithy, useless advice.
—m. forajter, author of WHITE DEER