Lara Glenum, SNOW

 

LET IT SNOW

A witch baby

I blubber out
into empire’s hooks

I warble out
a curl-i-cue girlsong

Swipe left to abort
my future
Swipe right

& Kerpow
I level up

to a darkbright
mutinous new world

I’mabsolutely fascinated by Louisiana poet Lara Glenum’s latest, the lively insistenceof her full-length collection SNOW (Notre Dame IN: Action Books, 2024),following The Hounds of No (Action Books, 2005), Maximum Gaga (ActionBooks, 2009), Pop Corpse! (Action Books, 2013) and All Hopped Up OnFleshy Dumdums (Spork Press, 2013). Composed as grotesque reimagining, allsexy and swagger, of the Snow White tale, the poems of Glenum’s SNOW aregestural, guttural and performative, provocative and large. “Why is femalepleasure such a threat,” she writes, to close the poem “DANCE CARD,” “Darling /You’re really a very dull beast / An insult to leaping animals // A travesty toskipping girls [.]” Glenum’s SNOW offers quite a different approach fromfairy tale reimaginings such as Jessica Q. Stark’s Buffalo Girl(Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023) [see my review of such here] or Katie Fowley’sThe Supposed Huntsman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) [see my review of such here], not to mention the array of dozens of poets working far moredelicate variations on other well-known myths and fables. “Mother is bleedingup new crime scenes,” she writes, to open the poem “THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL,” “Herpoisonfingers drawing lethal rings around snapping necks / Mother is toxiclethal contagion / & I’m a corrupt copy / of her ambivalent love [.]” The strengthof any story, so they say, is in its mutability, and Glenum offers a variationon Snow White that is theatrical, pulsed and even staccato; eight sectionsreveling in the performative gesture to the point that such a poetry titlecould be directly adapted for the stage. The poem-sections, also, are almostset as scenes across her book-length performance--“LET IT SNOW,” “MIRROR!MIRROR!,” “PALACE DAYS,” “MIDWINTER BALL,” “THE HUNT’S AFOOT,” “THE POISONLODGE,” “GLASS COFFIN” and “GOODBYE”—each poem within composed as a speakingpart by one of the book’s central characters. As the poem “MOTHER’S LITTLEHELPER” reads:

I’m a doozie
of a wild witch
            Kween of the Undermundo            I fake out deathstars
                        with my magyk mirror
Heads roll & pump
sex grease
            in tribute to my booty

So I drink the blood ofvirgins
So what
Who doesn’t
                        That’s patriarchy for you     who am I
            to claim I’m on the outside
                                    So I’m a bottom-feeder So the heckwhat
Bottom’s up!
canonly mean one thing
                        when there’s a boot on your neck

Thecharacters are rich, textured and animated, nearly cartoonish in theirdepictions. Curiously, the collection was previously titled, according to herauthor biography via the Poetry Foundation website, “White Trashed: ASnow White Story,” and Glenum offers a pulsing narrative of sexy, savage accumulationsof cosplay and punk, swirling a teenaged Snow White across a propulsive lyricof “wet bone and seeping eros” as she battles the Evil Kween for her verysurvival. This is, after all, a book about agency. Each poem reveals another unfolding of the narrative, akin to a pokerhand, one card at a time, each one playing off the one that came before. “I’mokay I’m loaded,” she writes, to close the poem “PUNK DEBUTANTE,” “with weepinginsects / I can live without medics // or even a home / I’m just a weepinganimal // in dire need of a disco bullet / to my singing skullmeat [.]”