Hex & Howl

by Simone Muench, Jackie K White

Poetry. You and I were told to swallow / our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian // and the mammalian, unless it's tame, / you know, cow-eyed, with a roundness eager / for petting. A powerful evocation of the feminist voice, HEX & HOWL both applies and upends textuality and tradition, parsing and refuting prior masculinist treatments of women's bodies. The poems in this collection forge multi-vocalities, some exhibiting pleasure in the parameters of the sonnet, others designing new poetic architectures through the double and multiple voicings of centos and self-portraits.

Now we do the refusing; now // we flame in the celluloid dark. HEX & HOWL is collaborative writing at its most innovative, playful, and powerful. Muench and White allow for the creation of a chimeric construction, a third-bodied poem that engages in language-play to explode notions of subjectivity, as the I and you and we shift and shimmer with agency and possibility beyond the page.

Like heroines harrowing Hell, Simone Muench and Jackie White rock and reel in these scintillating collaborative sonnets and portraits, resurrecting the girls buried in the woods and garden of misogynist brutality, refracting ruin through ingenious sequences of sense and sound. Wielding needle and shovel, scalpel and gavel, Muench and White 'churn those ashed hours into aurora, ' stretching the sonnet's corset into glorious trumpet, 'spinning loose from that pinned darkness' into incantatory song after song --each line a rivet, sorrowful and resplendent, fiery curse and wise dirge --giving voice and ear to those who were not heard, in searing soaring stereo. --Anna Maria Hong

The chapbook HEX & HOWL, a collaboration between Simone Muench and Jackie K. White, delivers twenty-six affirmations of individual resilience in response to forces of silencing or erasure. The title poem sets the premise that 'You and I are told to swallow / our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian // and the mammalian, unless it's tame, ' but goes on to signal a sharp shift, 'Now we do the refusing; now // we flame in the celluloid dark, a primal / rewinding� ]' The poems in this collection invite us to 'Let bees shimmer inside our eyes instead / of men's glory, ' and inform us that 'We took the garden with us, now the gavel // is our godhead.' Finding fuel in memory, and ignition in lines from poets such as Akhmatova and Pizarnik, the poems instruct readers that 'We can't recast ruin. / We have to sit in the taint. Survive it.' We exit this chapbook at a point of catharsis, fortified by the sway of sonnets, empowered to face our predicaments with fresh ferocity. --Mary Biddinger

Genres: Poetry

44 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2021

About the author

Simone Muench was raised in Benson, Louisiana and Combs, Arkansas. She is the author of five full-length collections including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Wolf Centos (Sarabande, August, 2014). Her most recent chapbook Trace received the Black River Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). Some of her honors include an NEA fellowship, Illinois Arts Council fellowships, Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry, Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, PSA’s Bright Lights/Big Verse Contest, and residency fellowships to Yaddo, Artsmith, and VSC. She received her Ph.D from UIC, and is Professor of English at Lewis University where she serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Collaborative sonnets, written with Dean Rader, are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Zyzzyva, Blackbird, and others.

Reviews

[Penelope · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this for class and it was subpar.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful and evocative images and turns of language in a book of divinely feminine power.

[Martina Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hex & Howl, by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White is not simply a book of poems. It is so much more. It is an experience. It is a collection of words that feels like a therapy session, at once profound, searing, and cathartic.

Each piece is set in the shape of a poem, or a sonnet, or a something I'm not smart enough to explain, and each takes one on a journey. Each takes one to a place where nobody wants to go, yet most of us have been. Internalized grief, loss, anger, or repressed frustration. Experiences we've not yet managed to unpack so as to unburden our psyches.

And yet, each short piece is unique, a beautiful tribute to the human condition.

As the seasons here in the Northern Hemisphere shift towards autumn, the opening lines of "Coda" resonate with me today:

Fingering old flesh wounds, false starts assail you. It's autumn. All we invent is another ending. Yellow singes orange scraping the blistered rage. That old palette of ruby rust.

As we all unpack the grief we've endured during the past decades, post 9/11, identifying our anguish is key. Or the lost eighteen months since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, finding the source of our pain can allow us to let go. Whatever the cause of our suppressed angst, reading poetry like the poignant works found in this collection, Hex & Howl, we can begin to heal, at least a bit.