Giving Godhead

by Dylan Krieger

As its suggestively punning title implies, Giving Godhead is a volume of poetry that challenges the boundary between the sacred and the obscene by conflating biblical images of “holy” acquiescence with sexually deviant forms of submission characteristic of BDSM roleplaying. This conflation of saintly and sinful acts of submission naturally centers around a meditation on Christ’s Passion, emphasizing the paradoxical way in which the Christian savior’s simultaneous authority and obedience fashions him into a heteronormative archetype of both masculine dominance and feminine submission, despite his own supposed celibacy. However, the manuscript ultimately looks beyond individual biblical narratives to illustrate their central commonalities and even interchangeability, locating echoes of Christ’s violent subjugation in Torahdic plagues, exiles, and burnt offerings alike. Similarly, this guiding principle of conflation or interchangeability extends also to Giving Godhead’s richly musical aesthetic, which features dense wordplay and double entendres in order to demonstrate the inevitable sensual trans-figurations of a “word made flesh” merely to be “broken and bruised for our iniquities.” In this way, Giving Godhead rewrites the foundational narratives of biblical mythology in light of contemporary gender and social theory, namely by portraying humanity’s relationship with a monolithic deity as the primordial paradigm of an imbalanced and abusive power dynamic.

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2017

Reviews

[AP Dwivedi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry gives me the impression of orgasm as a moment of beautiful, sick, seeking entropy escaping from a sad little bundle of negentropy. And orgasm is diverse. The same way a pyro stands mesmerized by a fire, so might the negentropic experience orgasm

I didn’t read this collection with intention. I read it lazily and in passing, so while I normally avoid scoring something highly without understanding it, the fact that this collection gave a bum with aesthetic sensibilities the vampiric, lugubrious ecstasy of such interesting thoughts elevates it

Could ask only a bit more from a book I consumed at the level of impressions. Entirely foreseeable that I reread more intentionally next time and realize it’s actually a 5/5

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a note of bias, Dylan Krieger wrote a blurb for my own up-coming collection of poetry, but I was moved by Krieger's strange verse upon discovering it. While the convolutions of sacred and profane have been explored by men from George Bataille to poet Bruce Beasley, but Kreiger brings a particularly female eye to the situation. Kreiger's catalogs of excess and its burdens can be as uncomfortable as the mutilated tongue on the cover. Kreiger's gift for convolutions implications shows up in her wordplay, which is abundant in her poems. While it will surely make the conventionally religious uncomfortable, Krieger's disaster-gasms also cast a theological reflection: the meditation on Christ’s Passion is paralleled to BDSM, the embodiment of Saintliness is contrasted with the mess of the body. Unlikely Bruce Beasley, who is clearly religious even his imaginings of the profane in Theophobia or Signs and Abominations, Kreiger sees deep-seated sexual neurosis in the passion and has a much more problematized relationship to the spiritual emerging from the finding the profane in the sacred. The liminality of the text gives it power, however, and I find myself returning to Kreiger's words over and over again to tease out exactly what the disaster-gasm could lead to.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dylan Krieger breaks through the opening gate with “in media rape,” saying “the wonder is I choke up—an avalanche of first-world excess—first thing every morning,” and it’s an immediate reminder of how sick we all say we've become of this modern excess, digital excess, political excess, sexual excess, everything excess, and yet every morning we reach for more. We’re all guilty of it in some way, and Krieger doesn’t hold back exploring her own world of cauterized sins, and in the process showing us our own too.

And “excess” certainly describes Krieger’s poetry. It floods the page with kaleidoscope verbiage and raw splendor, saturated with digital-age codifiers of sexual exploration and exhaustion, showing how we want and want a break from the want at the same time. It’s awful. We take more. It’s forced on us. It’s fire. We burn. We all burn.

The poems are prayers for the strung-out, who whisper for some god somewhere anywhere to please fucking slow things down so we can catch our breath, but then the next poem is there racing full speed down the page, screaming side-eye at the excuses for “forced consent” that give some people a free pass through life; howling religious hymnals sanctified by its own deviant wanderings; Christ-filled rape dreams and sanctified amputations of limb and soul, tongue-in-cheek but viciously serious all the same.

In some poems I’m tempted to say there’s excess and edge for the sake of shock, and there are certainly lines written with the intention of unsettling and upsetting any reader, but the more I read the more I got the feeling that through the spinning Catherine wheels of stagecraft there are deadly invocations of all our sins brought to light, a seriousness many might overlook, an anger simmering behind the word-craft wrestling with the kind of lust, lies, and alarm that we don’t talk about openly. It’s not proper. It’s not right. It’s exactly what Krieger displays with sweeping Jackson Pollock splatterings of everything we should/shouldn't discuss—sex, and all the heavens and hells that come along with it, all the putrid guilt, shame, hate, and gutting desire.

As she says in “animal crown,” “such thorny stories tend to shift like organs. but the most important portion is the cruci-coma squirming out my wormhole. what happens after is a rarefied disaster-gasm.” In her own words, a perfect summation of the collection and style—a disaster-gasm of the kind of poetry you don’t take home to mother, unless you’re done fucking around and keeping your sexual wounds behind closed doors. Krieger is clearly knocking on that door, ready to walk inside in full regalia.

(Review originally written for Hobo Camp Review)

[Isham Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple THC-infused IPAs should put me into a loopy-enough frame of mind to approach this strange poetic animal sideways. If I’m having trouble making sense of the title, it’s because my superego has already repressed its import; but it is indeed a pun. And more to the point, if I don’t comprehend much of the poetry, I don’t need to. Who says we must arrive at the “meaning” of something as shape-shifting as a poem, much less a poet who makes it her business to investigate the subliminal unconscious, the realm of literary riot where religious and sexual symbols freely fuse and couple? The surrealist poets also worked with primeval material, yet their singsong word collages seem banal by comparison: “…clean out your cockpit of intoxicated spiders / Tear the sexual leaves of grief from your heart / Pluck the feathers of nostalgia from your nipples / Push the slowmoving masochistic mudslide / of contralto voices / from your afternoon skull of anxiety” (Jayne Cortez, from the collection Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion). And then there’s the likes of Sylvia Plath (echoes of which appear in Krieger), who mastered poetry as a musical vehicle, an oral art meant to be read aloud, an incantatory poetry of violence which while unconstrained by the strictures of suburban America was also unmoored from reality and sanity, but even Plath seems tame next to Krieger’s serpentine cadences: “every sabbath eve in my rape dreams I swaddle christ’s body in spray-on glitter & kitty litter as in, literal pedigree: we bred a savior from king David and a rainstorm spitting brain matter simultaneously baby, rave zombie, and crane-lifted detonator, watch how he weeps for the seepage to fall down….and all he could muster was bad manna & flames the size of a mustard seed” (from “swaddling plot”). For the benefit of the perplexed, she concludes the volume on a more conventional note with her “Sacreligion Manifesto”: “TODAY SOMEBODY ASKED ME IF I HAD ANY 'INTEREST' IN WRITING ABOUT THINGS OTHER THAN GODDAMN! AND SEXUALITY....PLEASE. SO MAYBE THIS IS ME: THREE PARTS PUNISHMENT JUNKIE AND SEVEN TENTACLES SAD MONSTER-BAITING JUST TO MAKE YOU STARE AWHILE. BUT SERIOUSLY: LANGUAGE IS MY FUCKTOY" (all caps are Krieger's).

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my style.

Favorites:
"Sacreligion Manifesto"
"gov. funding"
"bad news, new world order"

I only feel alive when I'm going down on america
- "peri-"

[Ashur · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need to read more of Krieger's work. At first I didn't "get it", but then the exceedingly clever wordplay became visible and I started writing, writing, writing. I probably need to get my own copy of this.

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This strange cover drew me in and I am so happy it did.

Some of the poem titles are shocking but the content masterful and smart.



Media, sex, religion, blood, anatomy and ceremony are all here.

[Andrea Levin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars would be a more accurate rating.

[Maria Hiers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly interesting to read and will be returning fs

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are such an enthralling fusion of god, sex, grotesque, and amazing wordplay. Loved all of them.

[Justin Moritz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love how the poet combine rhythm and visceral imagery to smack your teeth right out of your head

[Jiapei Chen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure if I got a lot out of this, but the wordplay of religious terms sure is fun as hell.

[angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretentious but a fun read nonetheless

[Robert Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing Poetry. A must read (rated R)

[Britt O'Duffy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the oral aurality of this book. Id abounds. Partly in the I'd (wishful composition of such a talented collection), but largely in imaginative imagery and the streaming of consciousness. Giving Godhead was grotesque yet pleasurable, touching on Catholicism's instilled ideology. Congrats, Dylan, on your first impressive collection.