In this entirely unheimlich debut, Lara Glenum enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model, swinging a string of what might be pearls.... The operating chamber is an operating theater, the stage set of the body indistinguishable from the other institutions that make our provincial village hum: mental hospitals, martyrs’ shrines, finishing schools. In an era where the term “surreal” has all the potency of a wink and a nod, Glenum recovers the political intensity and daring of the Surrealist project.
"The extraordinary precision of these poems is so stunning, we can't help but feel blinded by their visions: sock-monkeys, dollhouses, and "a circus made of meat" vibrate between the playful and the brutal so deftly, each line is a perfect shard of some fantastic planet, gloriously and sadly like our own. As in Blake's apocalyptic images, the sky rolls itself up like a scroll--brilliant in its colors and infinite in its scope. Glorious!"
—D. A. Powell
"A war is on. Or rather, the war that is the female body has formed an army (or is it an art school?). We enter into the collective memory of The Hounds of No understanding these are experiences we’ve never experienced, visions we couldn’t have had, and yet we recognize all. These poems were excavated (or did they evacuate?) from a Catholicism that is no longer religious, from a woman’s body that is no longer female, and from a disease so dynamic that it’s forgotten it’s an illness. The grotesque is domestic, and the domestic, war-torn. The Hounds of No is morbidly brilliant."
—Claudia Rankine
Selected Reviews:
Jacket Magazine
H_NGM_N
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