A Ballet (or Salvos) of the Anti-Real

A Ballet (or Salvos) of the Anti-Real Gary Hawkins The Hounds of No Lara Glenum Action Books http://www.actionbooks.org 64 pages; paper, $12.00 In the "necropolis" of The Hounds ofNo, Lara Glenum rightly proclaims: "I am Queen." And although these poems form a decidedly contemporary empire, they maintain an allegiance to an earlier avant-garde and its rigorous creation of unlikely associations to access a dream-state of art. In the unreal landscape of Brassaï's Paris, for instance, night and fog cut across familiar images of the city: shadows on the Grands Boulevards erase a windowshopper at her waist—and lovers at a small café fracture in their mirrored banquette as all sentimental notions of a romantic tête-à-tête transform into a rendezvous of disembodied heads. The Hounds ofNo, Glenum's startling first collection of poems, properly finds the source for its surprising and violent juxtaposition within this tradition. With scenes of ecstatic dismemberment, fogs of enjambment, white space and hyper-punctuation, and a dark cast of irony, the book sings the dirge of realism as it spins the dance of the surreal. But "surreal" is a blunt descriptor, since surrealism , as it is rehearsed in poetry journals these days, consists of an easy paratactical mechanics: any potentially sentimental image is quickly undercut , and stanzas take aggressive, distant leaps as if to accuse narrative of being a conservative pursuit. Lara Glenum rescues the surreal from these abuses. Moreover, she employs its tactics with original political purpose that requires a shift ofterms. She will be, as she proclaims in the manifesto that concludes the book, defiantly "Anti-Real" in her response to the "mock world of realism," which has, with its narrow and totalizing views of beauty, inflicted a set of airbrushed glosses onto the female body, and which must be stripped bare. Indeed, myths of beauty and of the body are literally exploded by The Hounds ofNo. The wartsand -all ode, "Excrescence," mocks both convention American "Review One of the Nation's LiVeMeSt General-Purpose Reader's Guides to Everything. —Mickael Beruhe Ask your local Bookstore or library to stock ABR. and the lover, whose "product-line" the poet hyperbolically praises: O! his sparkling cotillion of zeniths & fake rabbit skins! O his wicked isotopes! Their ecstasy is a destruction in which "his ribs burst open" and her "pleasure-domes / cave in," and at their climax the heavens open up and an axe falls •out to decapitate the poet. At once playful and deeply disturbing, Glenum lays out the dance ofdesire as "a circus made ofmeat," one in which, in another poem, even a sexual icon like Marlene Dietrich is a butcher waving her cleaver and trying to lure some "winsome animals" by lifting her skirt. And beneath her tresses will never be any common fetish of creamy, hidden skin. No, intimacy here is decidedly of-the-flesh, and Dietrich reveals her "charcoal stubs of. . .legs." As shocking as these revelations are, Glenum's mode is a familiar one, and her methods can be understood with further analogy to the surrealist tradition as practiced by Brassai. While photographing Paris AfterDark (1933), Brassaialso created a set ofnudes that abstract his female models into shapes he saw as mandolins and almonds. Yethis more surprising treatment of the body comes in Transmutations (1967), where he etches into original, exposed photographic plates of these nudes, redefining a body with heavy outline and over-writing a body with crosshatching until she is no longer a pin-up but an assemblage of fruit, or until she becomes what he titles one etching, an "Offering"—and the stakes of gazing and of desire are reduced to a painful commentary. Glenum's sharply etched poems that expose our superficialities and still love our fleshiness similarly inscribe awareness to leave us disturbed. Still, where Brassai can afford a mode ofuntailored experimentation, Glenum faces more severe stakes, including a persistent modern assault on the female body, which surrealism of this old sort only affirms. The Real does not exist. Glenum refuses to retreat from this assault; nor will she completely abandon the surrealist legacy, even as she offers poems under the rubric of her own...