The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution – by Karyna McGlynn
Karyna McGlynn’s The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution sends readers into a disruptive fervor. “There is an abundance of something in me,” one poem’s narrator confesses, “if only black bile.” McGlynn tangles word and flesh to stunning effect, tucking us under velvet curtains, while the gaslights flicker.
The 9-Day Queen is a potent missive of chloroform ad lyric cryptography that effortlessly mixes diction like underground liquors in an unlicensed abattoir. This is old-school, Pentecostal unrest, taking on gender and violence without spilling a drop What will you do, McGlynn asks, “when I prop my boots & shoot my mouth, you unschooled in quailing / women of elaborate hairdo or fat vocabulary”? The answer is simple: enjoy the hell out of this raucous, polymorphous, polyglot artifact. -Simeon Berry
Once you’ve entered “the smaller door inside the garden shed” there’s no getting found. Tendrils & tentacles play at your hem. The queen of gimme gimme gimme, mcGlynn is a master of casting spells and splitting the earth in twain with her formidable music. “Slip your hand,” with her, “under the black lace of language.” See what you are “chained to by virtue of scale.” -Martin Rock
Karyna McGlynn’s poems are whip-smart in the “malleable plaything” they make of language, their speakers indolently ferocious in the face of sex and excess and redemption. Elegant in its vulgarities, gorgeous in its speed and pin-turns, The 9-day queen finds herself in the “chutes, pulleys, baited meat hooks” and lushness of desire. -Brittany Cavallaro
The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution is in the Surrealist Poetry Series. Chapbooks in this series can be purchased here.