excerpted from CHAPBOOK ROUNDUP:
CARRIINGTON, ELLEN, KESSENIICH,
& MCGLYNN
by Andrew Kozma, from RATTLE e.5, Fall 2008
Karyna McGlynn’s Scorpionica is a beautiful book, both in design (like Carrington’s Hard Blessings) and content; this is not that surprising, since the chapbook was published by New Michigan Press, the same people associated with the on-line magazine Diagram, a journal overly concerned with design and appearance. But outside of the visual aesthetics, McGlynn’s book fits the idea of a chapbook I put forward at the beginning of this review: the book is a coming-of-
age story of a young woman told chronologically and from multiple perspectives—an easily comprehensible premise, and yet only a few of the poems take the easy road in terms of narrative
or image.
This is not to imply that the book is non-narrative or non-linear, though you might be forgiven for thinking so upon reading the first poem, “Animals Going to Hell.”
Quiver gentle over their sins,
taste the spring melt.
Nothing on the television
about taboos or the mongrels
which are unto our city—
Who is
letting you go, ma chienne?
Where will you crawl to die?
The blossoms
on the tomato-plants are falling
fast this year, only June now.
This morning here, a little girl
came into our kitchen,
a rifle through her empty leash.
That’s the entire poem, and if you can enter into it, let it enter you, then you’ll have no difficulty with any of McGlynn’s poems, many of which are more distinctly narrative, but none of which loose their tight grip on language or abandon belief in the evocative image. Her poems dance within an awareness of line and form whether in couplets or in free-verse style blocks where shape is
chiseled out of the exact right word turning the line back into itself. These poems exhibit an awareness of adult life in a dash for the erotic that isn’t afraid of raunch, whether with summer camp girls or flowers. Here’s both:
We knew, intimately, the location of every penis
on the grounds of Camp Mystic for Girls—
each man a burning “Y” beneath our eyelids.
(“The Men of Camp Mystic”)
Loose, the violent bulls-eye genitals
of overblown poppies, bloody dinner plate
(“Suburban Barbarism”)
I admit, I like poems that resist me, that call to be re-read because you’ve been skimmed like a stone along a beautiful surface. But that resistance is also a matter of complexity, by which I mean an awareness that life is not simple, and a poem which provides a simple answer isn’t even a beautiful lie. These poems aren’t difficult, but they do show craft, a depth of language, an awareness of poetic technique, a wealth of tools that demonstrate McGlynn is beyond her
apprenticeship and is writing poems full of emotion and weight, not with ease, but with the appearance of ease.
And this is not to say that there are no flaws here, no poems that leave off like unexpected dead-ends or images that reach too far and fall short. But unlike many chapbooks, many sold for just a little less than a full-length book of poems, Karyna McGlynn’s Scorpionica is worth the price of entry. I’ll leave you with these lines from the title poem that perhaps describe the poet herself, or the reader’s intense pleasure in reading:
I figure and refill with figure, words looping
their long unfinished tails along my lips.
(“Scorpionica”)
ANDREW KOZMA received his M.F.A. from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. in English
Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Zoland Poetry, Subtropics, AGNI Online, Dislocate, Hunger Mountain, and a non-fiction piece was recently published by The Iowa Review. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award and was released in September of 2007.