SNOW
by Lara Glenum
ISBN: 978-0-900575-19-8 | 131 pages | $18.00 | Release Date: April 15, 2024
“Hell is a ripe daughter”
With singular bravura, Lara Glenum retells the Brothers Grimm Snow White as a rollicking exploration of a mother-daughter relationship that waxes murderous. In this darkly funny chamber opera, a teenaged Snow White and an Evil Kween trade deadly ripostes, locked in a brutal struggle for survival. Only one of them can be “the fairest of them all” and command the blessing of patriarchy and the legitimacy of the throne. The Janus-faced mirror ensorcels, Prince Harming starts riots, and the Dwarves are a cyber-militia on the payroll of the crown. With perverse wit and dazzling imagination, SNOW probes the recesses of gender-based trauma, subverting cultural norms surrounding femme sexuality.
REVIEWS OF SNOW
The strength of any story, so they say, is in its mutability, and Glenum offers a variation on Snow White that is theatrical, pulsed, and even staccato; eight sections reveling in the performative gesture to the point that such a poetry title could be directly adapted for the stage. The poem-sections, also, are almost set as scenes across her book-length performance.
Praise for SNOW
Snow grotesque? What’s exaggerated here contra the o.g. Wonder Tale or Disney’s dewy take where the sopped and swollen melisma was a three-explosion euphemism of gimme gimme? To amplify’s not to overblow; Lara Glenum cranks up the horny anxiety of a Kween’s “Who’s the fairest of them all” and duels it against a princess who knows her prince will cum. Knives out. What SNOW slashes hardest even as its protagonists lacerate-to-limn daughter/mother tropes is the fairy tale that a woman’s desire mitigates her exploitation or assault. And Glenum does this brutal bladework with ferocity, leaving every bodyfluid on the castle’s floors but tears. This isn’t Snow White updated and subverted; nope, it’s Snow White stripped back to wet bone and seeping eros, to bloody appetite and junk power, to sublime dirt and dirt and dirt.
— Douglas Kearney
One of our greatest living poets, Lara Glenum’s sorcery on the page is unmatched. Her work is bawdy, ingenious, glittering. SNOW is Glenum at the pinnacle of her powers. Through this darkest of fairy tales, Glenum holds up the Evil Kween’s occult mirror, revealing our archaic nightmares alongside our latest, trickiest ‘punishment cupboards.'” “A princess is a junk meme & I’m a junk means by which power asserts what & who,” Snow proclaims. At its splayed-on-a-platter heart, this is a story of a mother and daughter pitted against one another by techno-necro-patriarchal-capitalism. Horny and violent and oozing and candy and strange, SNOW is a singular work of art.
— Kate Durbin
About the Author
Lara Glenum is the author of four books of poetry, including Pop Corpse, Maximum Gaga, The Hounds of No, and All Hopped Up On Fleshy Dumdums, a limited edition art book. Her poetry has been described as “a splattered fairy tale for today, a new flavor of poetic candy, and, ultimately, a pleasure to read.” She teaches literature and creative writing at LSU.