Hothouse by Karyna McGlynn
Sarabande Books, 2017
A Sexual Tour of the Deep South by Rosemary Daniell
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975
In 1975, Rosemary Daniell finalized her iconic feminist poetry collection, A Sexual Tour of the Deep South. Complete with some of the harshest indictments of the patriarchy in literature, Daniell’s verse ripped the lid off rape culture. Forty-two years later, Karyna McGlynn’s Hothouse continues the explosive tradition of exposing gender strictures and power disparity in American culture.
The similarities begin with the covers. Daniell’s front image depicts a prominent vaginal facsimile. McGlynn’s book displays the shocking sight of a woman crammed into a kitchen garbage disposal; only her blue-stockinged legs remain, in an inverted “V.” Daniell’s speaker foretells this scene in “What’s Happening,” where she describes a vagina as “an inversion, the letter V / a V-letter, a lower form / with one center.” McGlynn’s cover image replicates this description.
But whereas Daniell’s speaker addresses women victimized within gender power dynamics, McGlynn’s speaker diverges, employing sexuality as a method of control and self-determination. In Sexual Tour’s “I Want,” the speaker confesses, “I want to say ‘No, baby, / not tonight.’” However, the Hothouse voice reveals no such timidity. In “I Can’t Stop Being Performative,” she demands, “Let me smell your armpits, I say. Don’t / pretend this is weird. I’m doing it for her, / not you. Shut up, I say. Let me.” Not only is there a temeritous display of personal control, but also a sense of disassociation, in which the woman receiving pleasure divides from the one dictating the terms of the encounter.
Heterosexual intercourse similarly transforms from male to female dominance. In Daniell’s “Lying There,” the speaker describes sexual congress as an act of painful contortion, even in consensual union: “Pull up / my legs, push my knees / toward my skull.” McGlynn’s speaker, in “California King,” reverses the role. During lovemaking, she states, “When I put my finger to his stitches, / he’ll spill his Right Stuff on my runway…” This image of digital penetration provides a reference to Jesus’ resurrection, when He demands Thomas insert his fingers into His spear-pierced side. Daniell’s speaker, meanwhile, a product of Flannery O’Connor’s Christ-haunted South, obsesses over religious imagery. She focuses on Mary’s impregnation in “Mary, Mary” and a lover’s emasculation in “The Annunciation.” In “Oh, Men!” she states, “. . . they hankered // not for the Blood of the Lamb, / but something similar.”
A Sexual Tour of the Deep South is a panorama of rape and predation, a record of misogony enshrined across the region. Hothouse, much more localized, narrates one speaker’s journey through female-male relationships. Daniell’s obtuse, faceless brutes grunt and shudder in self-gratification. McGlynn’s speaker, however, puts more of a human face on her men as they bumble through the pitfalls and complexities of relationships. And it is here, in the 42-year gap between volumes, that Daniell’s shadowy, monster-inhabited landscape slowly focuses to McGlynn’s pitiable assemblage of damaged men, cruelly insisting on wrapping a new bride’s kitten heels with cottonmouths.
–
Paul David Adkins lives in Northern NY. He served in the US Army from 1991-2013. Recently, he earned an M.A. in Writing and the Oral Tradition from The Graduate Institute in Bethany, CT. He spends his days either counseling soldiers or teaching college students in a NY state correctional facility.