Hitting Us Where We Live

On Karyna McGylnn's Hothouse

On Being A Woman

"my head in one of thosebig paper cones to keep a bitchfrom biting her woundse"

"So you want to know where I live?" is the first line of this collection. What an intimate question. What an intimate act it is to bring someone home. The speaker brings us through her house, from the bedroom to the basement, and yet the tour feels more like a guide through a museum. A performance. "They share this mattress. / But they aren't home."

Hothouse is as intimate as you can get without any actual intimacy. A one-night stand that lasts for a few nights, or sex without kissing. Something like that. "If you loved me you'd call this / costume a costume," reads the penultimate line of "I Can't Stop Being Performative." Real intimacy these days is playing along, the speaker suggests.

What a perfect answer to this particular cultural moment. The Silence Breakers are the Persons of the year. The future is female. We're in the midst of a cultural shift, nay, revolution, and McGlynn seems to have her finger on the pulse. Like some new-age Rich: "the thing she came for" is the image and not the thing itself. As if Hothouse is somehow the movie version of itself.

The strangeness of this collection reveals a version of what it might mean to be female in 2017. What it meant. It is hysterical, in every sense of the word. It makes us uncomfortable. "I wanna be so Girl for you that I get all, "Yeah!" / with my bubblegum baby-making machine", McGlynn writes, and I think, "yes!" Finally a poem that captures how fun and terrible it is to be inside this body. The putting on of womanhood as a dress made to slim you down to size. As you read, you feel as though you're at a real party with the threat of violence lurking just around the corner, as you might feel in general in this era. We're all living in a hothouse.

On Poetry

"And if I can just/keep my shit together for one last deep scan, I think, / I can defrag the contract I broke with my readers / long before any of us were born"

"Splice it, sell it, set fire to the archives?"

I feel as though I can talk to the speaker the way she talks right to me. She calls me "both reader & lover," but I never agreed to that. The familiarity of this collection feels just like a relationship that's lasted a little too long. It is both hot and cold. Amongst allegations of fake news and alternative facts, this collection suggests that the reader can no longer be the passive voyeur she once was. We are an active element of Hothouse. The book openly depends on us readers to watch the performance. "I want to write with the door open," the speaker claims. The speaker wants us to watch. I want to, too.

On Death

"We need a new imagination when it comesto death. If only for our own sake. I'm tiredof imagining the dead sitting on swingswith no one in the world to push them"

For a collection that is so vibrantly alive, Hothouse spends a lot of time talking about death. A house full of ghosts. This makes sense to me. What is life without the end as a backdrop?

On Ambition

"A Man says, 'What do you really want?'She says, 'To be the most important poetof my generation.' The man looks away"

What I love about this collection most of all is also what I envy. The poems are brave, they are loud, they are ambitious. The entire collection announces itself as massive, the sections titled as rooms in what one assumes to be a very large house (Library, Parlor, Wet Bar). Hothouse is neither ashamed nor afraid.

In a civilization where we educate girls into meekness, whether we mean to or not, Hothouse offers something else: a celebration of girlhood, womanhood, femininity as...