Out of the wormhole, into the squirmhole
"Snow" by Lara Glenum
Snow by Lara Glenum, Action Books, 2024
Snow White gets the royal fuckery in this maladaptation of the classic Grimm Brothers’ tale, rendered here as a cautionary tale of surveillance, power, and patriarchal pricks; the Disney dumbdown version given life (sound the death toll) via a spilling of fresh blood, a knee to the nards, Prince Harming’s generous member caught in the vicegrip’s twist-tease . . .
I taught Snow in my poetry workshop this past week, and it was brutal to watch my students process this remixed fairy tale in the context of a tragic election that precisely resembled the horror story Glenum concocts. The poison that never leaves the system. Snowflake’s (the titular character) girl-body shredded (rather literally) by the Evil Kween’s desire to eradicate Snow’s burgeoning sensuality in favor of feeding the lust-hunger of the invisible overlords whose voices echo through the Kween’s obscene visions. Heartbreaking, to watch the Kween’s unstable complicity devalue her daughter’s bodily vulnerability.
Context aside, these poems are fun as fuck. Dancing between POVs (Snowflake, the Evil Kween, the Magyk Mirror, data mining dwarves, … ), the fairy tale’s fantastical violence spills from the language itself, these voices inhabiting a chromatically supersaturated oil-spill of a world that infests their tongues with compound nouns and perfect line breaks. Says Snow, “I’m just a weeping animal // in dire need of a disco bullet / to my weeping skullmeat,” which pretty well sums up the vicious ball of cartoonish illegiance Glenum throws. Afterparty of asphyxiation. The state of the nation.