7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Show Up Twelve Years Late For Curfew, October 19, 2009
This review is from: I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems (Kathryn a. Morton Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl's anthem could be "there is so much I want to prevent" and so the poems run interference between the living and the dead, and like the multi-faced, clairvoyant speaker who is both breathing and buried, so McGlynn's poetic eyes are split: one serving as photographer, while the other acts as profiler, so that we are witness to what occurs within, and beyond, the frame. Working in a lyrical investigative mode, often using a columnar fragmentation, in which the work appears as vertical belts along the page, the poems are concurrently singular and dialogical.
For McGlynn, every innocuous object has an ominous counterpoint--the bed as operating table; a farmhouse for egg production as killing site; panties as childhood emblem and crime-scene evidence; exposure as photographic process and life-threatening condition. These poems, ravenous and ravishing, debone everything in sight, and what a sight it is--a rose hung on a hook like rapist bait; water so moss-viscous it appears as Prell; radioactive fish; piss in a glass; and Christmas crèche. While her book documents various defacements and violations, ultimately the work highlights volition and reconstruction. McGlynn's book exhibits such spark and voracity it feels channeled instead of penned; and though it may knock us slant into the pitch, it is lit with luminol, liberating what is hidden, and in the process, illuminating and transforming us.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Attitude sickness, January 12, 2012
This review is from: I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems (Kathryn a. Morton Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
Lacks the wit/drive/structure of Alabama Steve from aptly named Destructible Heart (not on Amazon). I read 'He's just having a little altitude earache' on p36 as 'attitude earache', which might have been preferable. The Revenant (relevant?) poems are best. I shall retain (I hope) the image of the protagonist having trouble 'forming the word "bouche" while drunk'. I guess we've all been there
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect., July 18, 2011
This review is from: I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems (Kathryn a. Morton Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
Karina McGlynn, <strong>I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl</strong> (Sarabande Books, 2009)
"I wake up somewhere in Ohio. Or, that's how it smells--"
While much is made of the first sentences of novels, no one really thinks all that much about first lines in a book of poetry. Maybe because a book of poetry is a collection, rather than a single work, in many cases. (And I bet half of you who can recite a single first line of a poem can do it from a book-length work, either Inferno, Paradise Lost, or Canterbury Tales. The rest of you... a Shakespeare sonnet. But you are in the way of my point, so clam up for the next four minutes, please.) But the first line of Karina McGlynn's <em>I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl</em> is such a slap in the face you can't help but think "here is someone who thought about it." Which is pretty awesome. And so's the rest of the book. The poem that supplies us that wonderful first line continues...
"There's a phone in my hand, I'm thirty years old.
No, the phone's thirty years old. Its memory's been erased.
I'm naked but for one of those hollowed scarves.
It keeps peeling off like a seedpod.
I'm afraid my sense will fall out,
get lost in the snow and make more of me."
("Ok, but you haven't seen the last of me")
...and you know, I could spend the rest of this review quoting that poem and this book would sell itself, because it's that good. Someone (can't remember who, book's back at the library) blurbed it as being <em>noir</em>, and I can see where she's coming from. There's a definite <em>noir</em> sensibility here, what a friend of mine recently described as "the dark side of existential exploration", the feeling of nihilism that comes with knowing from the first frame of the film, or the first page of the book, that your protagonist is going to be swinging from a rope by the end. But--and I rush to note that this may just be in my head--when I hear <em>noir</em>, I tend to think plot and structure, and had it in my head going into this book that it was a thematic collection or a poem cycle (or god help us a "verse novel"). In case your mind works the same way as mine, I point out that such is not the case. There are relations, naturally, as there are in any poet's work, but there's not a story arc or the like. There are just poems, and they are the best poems I have read since I first discovered Richard Siken four years ago. (Yes, I have given five-star reviews to poetry books in the interim. Yes, there are grades of five-starri-ness.) They're unwashed and they're dirty and they're a little feral and they're unconscionably sexy, within the framework that if you find yourself in bed with them they're as likely to bite a chunk out of your arm as to allow you access. This is a book that doesn't like you. I mean actively doesn't like you. And it's all the more alluring for it. The best book I've read so far in 2011, hands down. *****
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