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Glorious Veils of Diane
Glorious Veils of Diane is about the weird way children turn themselves inside out on the world, and a reimagining of the author’s own childhood. Diane is an ever-changing archetype, a self-conscious child who's seen too many horror movies and is discovering, for the first time, her own blood. A child who thinks she is God, and who sees every person in her life as an extension of herself. A child who is possessed, beloved, and ignored. The book emerges through a chorus of voices belonging to Diane, the people around her, and blood itself. At some point, Diane disappears. The book then investigates that disappearance, jumping back and forth through time, the physical world, and the spirit world. Ultimately, it suggests that Diane is not what is behind the veils; Diane is the veils.
88 pages, Paperback
Published February 27, 2021
9 people want to read
About the author
Rainie Oet
7 books28 followersRainie Oet is a trans woman who writes fiction and poetry for adults and young readers.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 2, 2021
Review: Rainie Oet. Glorious Veils of Diane. Carnegie Mellon University Press., 2021. $15.95.
By Keith Stahl
KeithStahl.net
Perhaps it was no mistake that I was in the middle of a ten-pound, heavily annotated, THIS BOOK NOT TO LEAVE THE LIBRARY-type version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the Victorian classic, and cultural origin of many of our vampire [mis?] conceptions), when I took a break to read Rainie Oet’s Glorious Veils of Diane. Oet’s poetry collection is a (kind of) modern vampire-coming-of-age story, with garlic, lots of blood, and darkly veiled symbolic allusions to sex. But there aren’t any bats, and the “creepy violin soundtrack” is only in Diane’s head. We learn that on “January 14, 1999, Diane disappeared” (remember the date!) — and then Oet whirls us through time and the “Blood Diary” entries of multiple narrators, each as obsessed with Diane as Diane is with herself. (Can we blame her? Even the stars in the sky are all named Diane!) Like the undead, Diane visits and revisits her various past selves (a baby in a crib who “chewed licorice in the dark”; a girl who thinks “‘fire.’ / And the house bursts into flames”); and then Diane laments: “we believed we’d be me forever.” Perhaps the “characters” — Diane, Girl Across the Street, Mother, Grandmother, Father, and BLOOD (the only entity which speaks outside the realm of the “Blood Diary”) — are not individuals at all, but a singular Diane entering one journal schizophrenically. Girl Across the Street serves as a kind of stand-in for the voyeuristic reader (“I feel self-conscious, watching.”) BLOOD seems omniscient, reliable, explanatory: “Ever drying, all blood runs. / It hurts.” The same ancestral blood that courses through Diane, flows through Mother, Father, and Grandmother. Perhaps the “character” BLOOD is the force compelling Diane to draw blood from herself, and to do compulsive things, like chug milk from the carton. Images of Diane’s self-mutilation can be unsettling, but there is a sense of empowerment —like when Diane looks through a piece of broken glass at her grandmother, but ignores warnings about bleeding: “[Diane] pinched the shard harder and / I heard it going through more of her / thumb.” Perhaps BLOOD wants to release itself from Diane, thus freeing Diane from her ancestral (genetic? gendered?) fate. Void from Oet’s project are antiquated, cut and dry, Dracula-esque renderings of cannibalistic blood-letting as pure evil. The collection reveals her transformation to be ethereally beautiful (“breathing / out red mist . . . the moon . . . shining through her”), and refuses to settle. The work is a vampire novel, a poetry collection about harm and self-harm, a song about love and the loveless where the melody drips between lines. Enticingly disturbing images spiral into the fourth dimension, loop-de-loop through the fifth — like the burning moth in Diane’s yard, “jerking to follow the trail of / its own glowing smoke, can’t realize it / is the light it seeks, is on fire . . .” Glorious Veils of Diane is on fire. Raine Oet is on fire. But, unlike Diane, who can’t quite seem to master her incendiary prowess, Oet’s third collection engulfs the reader in a controlled burn of can’t-put-it-down prose-poetry and free-verse, guiding the stake into its own heart.
Pre-order Glorious Veils of Diane:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/...
Go to Rainie Oet’s website:
https://www.rainieoet.com
By Keith Stahl
KeithStahl.net
Perhaps it was no mistake that I was in the middle of a ten-pound, heavily annotated, THIS BOOK NOT TO LEAVE THE LIBRARY-type version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the Victorian classic, and cultural origin of many of our vampire [mis?] conceptions), when I took a break to read Rainie Oet’s Glorious Veils of Diane. Oet’s poetry collection is a (kind of) modern vampire-coming-of-age story, with garlic, lots of blood, and darkly veiled symbolic allusions to sex. But there aren’t any bats, and the “creepy violin soundtrack” is only in Diane’s head. We learn that on “January 14, 1999, Diane disappeared” (remember the date!) — and then Oet whirls us through time and the “Blood Diary” entries of multiple narrators, each as obsessed with Diane as Diane is with herself. (Can we blame her? Even the stars in the sky are all named Diane!) Like the undead, Diane visits and revisits her various past selves (a baby in a crib who “chewed licorice in the dark”; a girl who thinks “‘fire.’ / And the house bursts into flames”); and then Diane laments: “we believed we’d be me forever.” Perhaps the “characters” — Diane, Girl Across the Street, Mother, Grandmother, Father, and BLOOD (the only entity which speaks outside the realm of the “Blood Diary”) — are not individuals at all, but a singular Diane entering one journal schizophrenically. Girl Across the Street serves as a kind of stand-in for the voyeuristic reader (“I feel self-conscious, watching.”) BLOOD seems omniscient, reliable, explanatory: “Ever drying, all blood runs. / It hurts.” The same ancestral blood that courses through Diane, flows through Mother, Father, and Grandmother. Perhaps the “character” BLOOD is the force compelling Diane to draw blood from herself, and to do compulsive things, like chug milk from the carton. Images of Diane’s self-mutilation can be unsettling, but there is a sense of empowerment —like when Diane looks through a piece of broken glass at her grandmother, but ignores warnings about bleeding: “[Diane] pinched the shard harder and / I heard it going through more of her / thumb.” Perhaps BLOOD wants to release itself from Diane, thus freeing Diane from her ancestral (genetic? gendered?) fate. Void from Oet’s project are antiquated, cut and dry, Dracula-esque renderings of cannibalistic blood-letting as pure evil. The collection reveals her transformation to be ethereally beautiful (“breathing / out red mist . . . the moon . . . shining through her”), and refuses to settle. The work is a vampire novel, a poetry collection about harm and self-harm, a song about love and the loveless where the melody drips between lines. Enticingly disturbing images spiral into the fourth dimension, loop-de-loop through the fifth — like the burning moth in Diane’s yard, “jerking to follow the trail of / its own glowing smoke, can’t realize it / is the light it seeks, is on fire . . .” Glorious Veils of Diane is on fire. Raine Oet is on fire. But, unlike Diane, who can’t quite seem to master her incendiary prowess, Oet’s third collection engulfs the reader in a controlled burn of can’t-put-it-down prose-poetry and free-verse, guiding the stake into its own heart.
Pre-order Glorious Veils of Diane:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/...
Go to Rainie Oet’s website:
https://www.rainieoet.com
Displaying 1 of 1 review