Description
“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.
From Hex & Howl
Disclosure
but dresses dressed in dresses are dresses—Saeed Jones
The dress says I will frame your beauty
when I bury you. The dress is a chateau
of ghosts demanding don’t go, don’t love
your nakedness. It is the vehicle, the volta
that comes too soon, without steering, only
sash for a wheel. Let it fly loose, grip yourself.
The dress is a liar laced with history’s lies.
Your beauty needs no frame; pivot on this
exposé as the body drowns its cargo
of blues beneath a voluminous red dress
that enters the room before you do.
Let it go on ahead, swirl its cliché, evoke
whatever gazes it can. That nakedness
you do love refigures any space you choose.
Simone Muench and Jackie K. White read for the Black Lawrence Press Virtual Reading Series
© Diane Cabrera 
