Poet Laureate Announces Newest Book

September 8, 2025
• Anne Nydam plans to release a collection of art, short stories and poetry, all themed around mythology and European folklore, next spring.

As Needham’s inaugural poet laureate, Anne Nydam has filled her schedule with workshops, school visits, library programs and more. However, she hasn’t slowed down her own poetry writing — actually, the opposite.

“The more your brain has poetry bubbling away in the back all the time, the easier it comes,” she said.

With her creative juices flowing, Nydam looks to publish “Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns,” which will include both her newer works and those dating back decades. Each short story, artwork and poem reimagines stories from fairy tales and Greek mythology by changing perspectives, subverting expectations and discovering new meanings and situations in the process.

“I’ve been kind of obsessed with fairy tales since I was a kid. I’ve always loved reading them. I’ve always been fascinated by them. And they’re often very weird,” she said. “[It’s] the idea of taking the parts that are magical and fill me with wonder… but there’s also these parts that are dark and weird and outdated.”

Nydam takes particular umbrage with Rumpelstiltskin, the Brothers Grimm story about a little creature who spins straw into gold for a young girl in exchange for gifts, culminating in the girl’s firstborn child. After receiving the gold, the king — who had locked the girl away — chooses to marry her.

“He was planning to kill you, and you’re supposed to be like, ‘Yay, I get to marry him!’” Nydam said. “And then Rumpelstiltskin comes back to take the baby, and it’s like he’s the villain now, somehow. He saved your life.”

In her book, she sets a revised Rumpelstiltskin story at an early Industrial Revolution mill, such as those in Lowell, and switches the point of view to dive into the storyline. Nydam also wrote pieces on Rapunzel, Snow White and other familiar tales. Every written work will include an accompanying artwork, though some art prints will stand alone.

After launching an ongoing fundraiser for the book’s publication, Nydam hopes to release the collection in April. She aims to include 15-25 poems, along with about a dozen stories.

Tales of Greek mythology will also populate the book, albeit in a new form. The titular “Pomegranate” refers to Persephone, who becomes trapped with Hades in the underworld after she is tricked into eating pomegranate seeds. In her retelling, Nydam flips the script, writing from Persephone’s perspective and imagining a narrative in which she chooses to eat the pomegranate all along.

The book’s “Thorns” correspond with the hedge of thorns from Sleeping Beauty, also included in the book. This will be Nydam’s 17th published work, following her most recent release “Bittersweetness & Light,” which was published in January of this year.

An exhibit at Gorse Mills this summer featured some of Nydam’s work, including a relief block print and poem on Medusa.

In her role as poet laureate, Nydam recently penned a poem about Needham, titled “Home, Needham 2025.” She also organized a Juneteenth ceremony featuring poetry and helped celebrate National Poetry Month in April with the Needham Free Public Library.

These stories, though told in our youth, carry dark themes that are arguably not appropriate for all ages, Nydam said. The details around these tales come into clearer view as you get older, which is partly why she is fascinated with the fantasy genre.

Their dreamlike, surreal atmosphere and setting defy more modern storytelling and logic, she said, which makes them more interesting to tinker with.

“The point is often trying to teach a moral lesson, like don’t disrespect the gods, or something like that. Don’t have hubris that you’re more powerful than the gods,” she said. “If you tell the story where that’s your point, the story is going to look one way, but if you decide to [examine] how this person is stuck in this seemingly impossible situation, then that suddenly twists things around and gives it a whole different look.”

In putting together “Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns,” Nydam has come to understand “there’s no right answer” to these centuries-old yarns.

“That’s the fun of these stories,” she said. “Because they have this life of their own and have been part of culture for so long, for so many people, everybody gets to look at it and take from it what is meaningful for them.”