The Hounds of No

by Lara Glenum

Poetry. Lara Glenum was raised in the gothic South, studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Virgina, and now teaches at the University of Georgia. In this entirely unheimlich debut, she enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model. 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 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.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2005

About the author

Lara Glenum is the author of four full-length poetry collections: The Hounds of No, Maximum Gaga, Pop Corpse, and All Hopped Up On Fleshy Dumdums. She is also the co-editor of Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics, an anthology of contemporary women’s poetry and visual art, and the upcoming digital second edition, Electric Gurlesque.

She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Prague and an NEA Translation Fellowship partner. She's currently an Associate Professor of English at LSU, where she's one of the directors of Delta Mouth, a national literary festival.

Reviews

[Farren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grotesque and violent, surreal, absurdist, fantastic. Sabrina Orah Mark with fewer dolls and more animated carcasses -- or Ariana Reines if she told fairy tales:

In the forest of ovaries, crimson trees snap beneath the
weight of their egg sacs. With a large, pearl-covered button, I
fasten the thick flaps of skin over the holes in my abdomen.
There are hairy rivers I will not cross. Dolls climb backwards
out of my mouth...

The Mother-body lives in a black velveteen parlor littered
with anesthesia canisters. As she works, glass figurines crowd
around her macular hole. Raptor fetuses shriek toward her
through the tired skies.

Midway through the book I found Glenum's appendixed Manifesto of the Anti-Real, which propelled me into I AM LOSING MY MIND:

The Anti-Real is that which seeks to manifest itself through the secret side-door to the Sublime rather than through the mock-world of Realism...

"Defile! Defile!" shriek the Obliterati as they vandalize the museum of silence. Secretly, they, to, are wet-nurses to sentimentality.

Sentimentality is a form of exploitation, a connivance with official lies. Hang sentimentality on the gallows of Emergency.

Glenum summons her Surrealist predecessors and dismisses them in the same breath: The King is dead. Long live the King. By making for us a nightmare otherworld full of pregnant spider-queens, skincapes, goat carcasses and braying angels with advanced weaponry and baroque wings, she declares her intention to draw our attention to the violence of language and the violence of thought, the violence of cultural mythology-- of queens, pornos, models, wicked witches, sock monkeys, ghouls, vanilla--and the absolute dreadfulness of living inside of a carcass. A carcass that is marked by signifiers: mother. Tits. Witch. Nails, amnesia, lace, skin. Ovaries, nerves, penises. Versace. Forest. Hearse. Hair. And so on.

Well-played, Lara Glenum.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lara Glenum is a headlock on creative writing, splashing pieces of absurdity in some twisted grotesque mash up. Her word usage blends so well with her sharp tongue.
A handful of favorites listed below

-St. Liberata and the Alien Hordes
-How to Discard the Life You’ve Now Ruined
-Aborted
-Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick

[Logan · Rating 2 out of 5]

If Marilyn Manson was a slightly more sophisticated writer, I imagine this book represents what he'd turn out. It's simply too much affectation, and I didn't buy it. It felt forced and faked. And, to me, it felt this was a book of one or two poems re-written over and over again to fill its 65 pages.

[Juliet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally up my alley.

Steaming up the shop windows with terrifying, titillating, sexy, sordid gore.

"O his product-line of meaty heaving in snowpiles!'

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Who can relax in our republic now that it's laid its terrible eggs on our tongues?"

[Ryan Bollenbach]

Much has been said about this book already, in praise or otherwise. I really enjoyed this, but given that my current interests have been shaped so much by Action Books (this book's publisher), I wasn't surprised about that. What I thought about as I read this was a) that it feels at once contemporary and understandably anachronistic (given the ways the contemporary political landscape [re: patrilineal misogyny] has transformed), and b) how interesting textural play of the images are throughout. It some ways, it's ornate and clean and shiny, but also very organic and pus-filled etc. Like a bunch of animals in a glass menagerie with oozing pustules.

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was outside on my deck in 90 degree weather when I started reading this book, and it gave me the chills. It is glamorous (in that it cast its spell). It’s gory as an original fairy tale. It is straight up feminist horror, which is great for a reader like me. I might even say it’s like Anne Carson, but more sinister, more graphic. And also it’s not. I have never read anything like this. I didn’t love the Sock Monkey poems as much as I loved the rest of the book. Otherwise, this is a five star collection for me.

[Jessica Mack · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately, this just wasn't quite my cup of tea.

[Cordia Ritz · Rating 5 out of 5]

the anna weyant of poetry

[Avery Houser]

In the Hounds of No. Glenum gradually builds the world of No. from an amalgamation of medieval literature, surrealist poetry, critical theory, and pop culture. In each poem she inhabits a different character of No., and as the book progresses we begin to see the connections between the various characters (most notably the Kriemhildes and Sock-Monkeys) build into a cohesive whole.

The characters live fairly grotesque lives, "I sprouted eleven ovaries & nine penises," "I fear my two bodies will have unseemly public duels," "she is a palace of desiccated fetuses."Her excessively sexual and violent language is at times wonderful as she uses it to at once paint beautiful scenes and disgust the reader. And yet, at times it feels superfluous, not carried to the full extent it could be, existing in a kind of limbo of the twisted. In certain poems the absurdity felt over-saturated to a point where I would be desensitized and bored by it.

Despite the imagery at times feeling empty, more often than not it served as a powerful tool for highlighting phenomenon related to self-image, how people interact, and language. It approaches all of its subjects in a way that is familiar, presenting fairly standard reflections, and yet radically new as she goes about it in a way so her own.In Message to the Department of the Interior she deals with a kind of Borgesian notion of the split self, by envisioning growing a second body. In The Adela P. Kerduckian School for Well-Bred Young Ladies she envisions a finishing school overseen by a three breasted "Mother-body" where students learn about "gothic fetish" from a centaur. In The Name of the Ghoul she imagines the death of language bringing the dead to life as zombies.

There is no clear position in Glenum's poetry. Her tone towards all of her subjects is at once condemning and celebratory. She takes great joy reveling in her world, which is also so bitter. She has a short manifesto in the end in which she states, "Irony is not a device. It is a state of being."

The book is littered with references: Alice, Sartre, Neutral Milk Hotel, and the whole thing feels like an homage to Burroughs. It is nice to see this kind of honesty about where her inspiration lies and it gives the otherwise foreign text a wonderfully eclectic literary grounding.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Hounds of No shocked me with its adherence to the principles of the Anti-Real, as outlined in the Appendix. I've never read anything like it. I was loaned this book by a friend, who described it as surreal and violent, and I concur with his assessment.

Glenum's pieces as published here are better digested as a whole than the original, piecemeal way I had begun to read it. Usually I'll open a poetry book and randomly select a piece to read. That technique didn't work so well with The Hounds of No. Once I made the commitment to cover-to-cover it, I saw patterns, characters emerging that tied the works together as a whole for me. I started to form a mental map of the landscape of her mind, a census of the population of No.

I was also surprised to find a line which perhaps inspired/was inspired by a song by Neutral Milk Hotel. I can see how their music meshes with Glenum's poetry. I can even imagine the entire album being inspired by the book.

Thank you, Lara Glenum, for giving me a new way to look at the constructs of language.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5)

sew the animals into your stomach (13)
but who can / relax in our republic now that it's laid its terrible eggs on our / tongues (17)
Pomplemoose Pass: famed for its sparkling glass road, which leads directly from the genitals to the cranium (21)
Of to teatime, I muttered, spitting out history like a terrible pill (22)
I whip clouds until they scream birds (32)
At the memorial service, I saw you wearing a tiara, lying in a body bag. The embryos inside you rode around on conveyer belts, shrieking with glee (34)

Love the title "In the Gynecological Museum" (22)

poem to use as writing exercise on using footnotes creatively:
"A Treatise on the Affective Origins of Female Hysteria & Schizophrenia (ca. 1880) (21)

poem to use as exercise / example on lists:
"The Coveted Remains of St. Kriemhilde" (39)

poem to use as writing exercise on creative use of lists:
"A Diagram of Kriemhilde's Dollhouse" (41)

[jess sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely incredible book of poetry. Probably one of the more ambitious and refreshing books I've read in a very long time. The aesthetic of the book, I'll call it the 'obscene surreal' because I'm not articulate enough to describe it better than that, is both inspirational and humbling in just how well crafted it is. I often got the feeling of visiting several little words inside a much larger one -- multiple series of poems that can stand on there own but shine with absolute brilliance within the context of the entire book.

There is a theme of repetition (of images, places, people) but the poems themselves never felt repetitive or re-hashed, something that I've found to be incredibly difficult to manage.


Action Books has a real gem here and I'm looking forward to reading Glenum's other work.

[Joe]

Habit of wanting to read first books first but read in the backlight of Maximum Gaga. Missed the rhythm/swagger of, the word invention, sense of surprise but found deranged topographies, pathological victorian interiors, big petrified landscapes--"zinc seahorses, the pig-iron clouds...stepping out onto the museum of the sea, among the obsidian dolphins...the anemones littering / the mica-encrusted shallows." Discursive in a way, do wonder what a tiny self contained Glenum populated Wunderkammer house or city or compound would look like. Also wonder how Glenum would define the Sublime as it appears in the end "Manifesto of the Anti-Real." Real interesting document as it tries to situate poetics in contemporary landscape and differentiate project from the surreal. Lots of conversations about the use/misuse/definitions of "surreal." Time to cultivate alertness!

[Sara]

I don't think I can really say I've read this book yet. From what I can tell you must first let its new language "greet" you, and then do it all it again, ideally in a long-during sitting. I read the first half or so over a long spell and then took in the last half in a short period of time. There are times at which I wanted moments of settling down from the alien and intensely eventful language for a breath, but I do think that would weaken the book into inconsistency. I admire it for the bold world it's boldly created.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

...the literary equivalent of "Piss-Christ." It's stuck in my head, so I have to edit my previous review based at least on effectiveness. It's either brilliant or horrid, and is often so on a line-by-line basis.

[Matt Walker · Rating 1 out of 5]

abandoned. life's too short.

[Maddy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I admire the project but I can't get behind how she uses language, which is a deeply personal reaction & unfair to Glenum.

[[archived] · Rating 4 out of 5]

princess meat

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

The images in this are phenomenally stunning and disquieting.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book scared the crap out of me!