Snow

by Lara Glenum

A phantasmagoric, surreal, erotic, and darky comical retelling of Snow White in the tradition of Anne Sexton and Angela Carter, but hyper-charged for our times.

With singular bravura, Lara Glenum retells the Brothers Grimm Snow White as a rollicking exploration of a mother-daughter relationship that waxes murderous. In this darkly funny chamber opera, a teenaged Snow White and an Evil Kween trade deadly ripostes, locked in a brutal struggle for survival. Only one of them can be “the fairest of them all” and command the blessing of patriarchy and the legitimacy of the throne. The Janus-faced mirror ensorcels, Prince Harming starts riots, and the Dwarves are a cyber-militia on the payroll of the crown. With perverse wit and dazzling imagination, SNOW probes the recesses of gender-based trauma, subverting cultural norms surrounding femme sexuality.

Genres: Poetry

131 pages, Paperback

Published April 18, 2024

About the author

Lara Glenum is the author of four full-length poetry collections: The Hounds of No, Maximum Gaga, Pop Corpse, and All Hopped Up On Fleshy Dumdums. She is also the co-editor of Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics, an anthology of contemporary women’s poetry and visual art, and the upcoming digital second edition, Electric Gurlesque.

She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Prague and an NEA Translation Fellowship partner. She's currently an Associate Professor of English at LSU, where she's one of the directors of Delta Mouth, a national literary festival.

Reviews

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glenum is poetic spit and punch, that stains and hurts. Her clever collection Snow is brutal, sexual and campy—a battle to be the fairest of them all.

Her poetry has been described as ”a splattered fairy tale for today, a new flavor of poetic candy and ultimately a pleasure to read.”

I recommend her collection Maximum Gaga first before you get dirty with this work of art.

Favorites:
Cancel Culture
Punk Debutante
Midwinter Balling
Dirty Arts
Cluster Analytics

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lara Glenum always blows my mind with her linguistic pyrotechnics-- so funny, so dark, so deep. In this one, she lays bare the dynamics within the story of Snow White in the feminist tradition of Sexton and Carter, but goes so much further, sexier, faster that it made my head spin. This version focuses on the mother/daughter problem, always a deep, dark vein, but definitely doesn't spare the patriarchy that is the context within which it functions. So much to think about and so much fun to read; it's always a holiday when I get a new work from Glenum. Long may she reign!

[Jared Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Protest art lmao"

[Ronnie Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

SNOW is a wildly irreverent and erotic reimagining of the Snow White mythos from Lara Glenum, whose knack bridging lyricism and colloquialisms make this one of the most fresh and enjoyable collections of the year. This collection is just plain fun to read with its laugh-out-loud humor and sharp wit. Readers are treated to mainstays of the familiar story, yet Glenum also brings the central conflict into the twenty-first century as she retools the bitter rivalry between a teenaged Snow White and the Evil Kween. Neither is innocent, and neither is without fault as they trade barbs and battle for control of the kingdom.

This is a remarkably fun collection, and the perfect read for summer. But readers be warned, Glenum does not hold back—this is a decidedly adult collection with explicit eroticism and vivid violence. It won’t appeal to everyone, but those who enjoy modern takes on fairy tales and distinctly lyrical vulgarity will devour the poems eagerly. For this reviewer, it was too good to put down, a true cover-to-cover read from the moment I opened it.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

All wrecked attitude and in-house mania, Lara Glenum’s holistically punkish Snow is a fairy tale of reverent perversion as told from the side of two recut mouths. In verse of such unified doubletalk, it hurts to hurt. It hurts to laugh. Glenum is a student of the student’s deep child, and outsources the body acoustic and orgasmic and dooms it and frees it to roam for both leisure and pleasure in an open-air escape room. So knowledgeably sad, Snow has beats so bleakly hilarious that one might need to see if the house is coming from inside the call. You won’t hear it coming.