“The Red Shoes” is a 2014 narrative poem written by the poet and activist Sheila Black. Originally published in Poetry magazine, it was included as the third poem in the collection Iron, Ardent (2017). Much of Black’s poetic life has been informed by her disability of X-linked hypophosphatemia, or XLH, which results in dwarfism and disability in the legs. Black is an advocate for poets with disabilities and for disability poetics.

A great deal of Black’s own work touches on her personal experiences, and she has said she considers herself at times a Confessional poet. Growing up as the daughter of a diplomat, Black lived in a variety of locations, and was exposed to poverty from an early age, quickly learning that life was full of uncertainty and danger. This position, or appreciation, informs “The Red Shoes,” which focuses on the poverty that surrounds the speaker and how they must survive a relationship troubled by addiction.

The poem takes place in New York City, in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, post 1970. It also includes a comparison to “The Red Shoes,” the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, where a young girl is cursed to wear possessed ballet shoes and dance to death. The girl is forced to amputate her feet and, in this way, the fairytale does touch on disability, one of Black’s major themes.

Poet Biography

Sheila Black was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 2, 1961. When she was a young child, it was discovered that she had Vitamin-D resistant rickets, also known as x-linked hypophosphotomia (XHL). This caused her “short stature, bowed legs, and short bones” (See: Further Reading and Resources). Doctors later straightened her legs when she was 13. Black’s disability shaped her life as well as her poetry, which she has discussed in several interviews.

Black went to Barnard College for her undergraduate degree in French, which she received in 1983. In the nineties, she decided to write poetry and enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in Creative Writing-Poetry at the University of Montana. She received her degree in 1998. In 2000, she was the co-winner of the Pellicer-Frost Frontera Prize, which brought her national attention.

The early 2000s brought more acclaim as she published her first two collections of poetry, House of Bone (2007) and Love/Iraq (2009). During this time, Black was a visiting assistant professor at New Mexico State University. In 2011 she was the co-editor of the anthology Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen. As one of the first anthologies that focused on disability poetics, this volume was much lauded.

In 2012, Black began working as the Executive Director of Gemini Ink, a literary arts center in San Antonio, Texas. That same year, she was selected by then United States Poet Laureate Philip Levine for the prestigious Witter Bynner Fellow. Her next collection Wen Kroy (2014) won the Orphic Prize in Poetry. Iron, Ardent, came out in 2017, the same year she edited a second anthology called The Right Way to Be Crippled & Naked: The Fiction of Disability.

In 2018, she left Gemini Ink to become the Director of Development for the Association of Writers and Writing (AWP), a position she still holds. In 2022, she co-founded and became the executive director of Zoeglossia, an organization that benefits poets with disabilities. A chapbook, All the Sleep in the World, was published in 2021 and the collection Radium Dream was released in 2022.

Besides being a poet, editor, and community leader, Black has published several books for children and young adults. She is married to Duncan Hays and is the mother of three children.

Poem Text

Black, Sheila. “The Red Shoes.” 2014. Poetry Magazine.

Summary

The poem begins when the speaker discovers some crimson ballet “slippers under the floorboards” (Line 1). The speaker then remembers a series of daily events: how they tried to fix the floors with several coats of “paint” (Line 3), how they chipped “a tooth” (Line 4) at a restaurant where, the next day, some patrons are killed by gunfire. This segues into a recollection of the “neighbor / woman (Lines 6-7) and her “back [that was] broken” (Line 9). Hurt people lead the speaker to remember two other acquaintances, a former preacher turned “crack” (Line 12) addict, and a woman named Irma who later is found dead in the “East // River” (Lines 18-19). The speaker notes the effect the preacher has on the shopkeeper who employs him. Due to the addiction, the employer must fire him and take on the additional workload himself.

The speaker then notes how they try to beautify their shared residence with their partner but keeps “repaint[ing]” (Line 26). The speaker’s partner begins to exhibit erratic behavior and winds up in a detoxification program after tearing up several of the speaker’s “letters and diaries” (Line 27). The speaker has to clean up the mess but receives some comfort from the shopkeeper as she cries. When the former preacher dies, the speaker goes to the cemetery to pay respects. The taxi driver gets lost and the speaker spends several moments looking at the many markers for the deceased.

The speaker then returns to the description of the “red slippers— // [that] must have been for dancing” (Lines 38-39). Now, severely damaged by wear, environment, and/or “mice” (Lines 2, 43), they are useless. The speaker reflects on a conversation with the partner about The Red Shoes, the 1948 movie, and notes its origin begins with an older fairytale in which the heroine’s shoes are cursed to remain on, sending her reeling from town to town. The speaker remembers that “her feet fall off, and her hands” (Line 47). In the speaker’s memory, the amputated limbs are replaced by “wooden ones” (Line 48).