The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost On Her Way to the Execution

Willow Springs Books ACME Surrealist Poetry Series

 

Karyna McGlynn’s The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution sends readers into a disruptive fervor. “There is an abundance of something in me,” one poem’s narrator confesses, “if only black bile.” McGlynn tangles word and flesh to stunning effect, tucking us under velvet curtains, while the gaslights flicker.

 

Available through Willow Springs Books.

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Praise for The 9-Day Queen

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"It’s easy to throw around a word like “fierce” when discussing the unapologetic brashness of some up-and-coming female poets, but it’s something else entirely that keeps me returning to the surreal and sexy images that comprise Karyna McGlynn’s growing oeuvre. Her first full collection I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, while drawing on themes of nostalgia and revenge, does so in a way that blows apart formal constructions of memories as well as poetry, seemingly at the level of the word. With fractal-like agility, her poems convey both strength and

delicateness, like snowflakes building into a glacier. When I first encountered her work, McGlynn’s poems terrified me with their raw beauty, but now I read her work with an excitement that comes with watching a confident poet maturing into her voice."

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-from Anna Saiken's review of The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution for Pleiades Book Review

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"The 9-Day Queen is a potent missive of chloroform and lyric cryptography that effortlessly mixes diction like underground liquors in an unlicensed abattoir. This is old-school, Pentecostal unrest, taking on gender and violence without spilling a drop. What will you do, McGlynn asks, "when I prop my boots & shoot my mouth, you unschooled in quailing / women of elaborate hairdo or fat vocabulary"? The answer is simple: enjoy the hell out of this raucous, polymorphous, polyglot artifact.”

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-Simeon Berry, author of Monograph and Ampersand Revisited

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