I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a GirlBy Karyna McGlynn |
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Reviewed by Callista Buchen
Winner of the 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Lynn Emanuel, Karyna McGlynn’s extraordinary I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl draws on a number of influences, most notably film noir. Reading the poems, you can almost feel the black and white shading, the angled sexuality, the promise of crime. Mystery smokes though each poem, establishing a kind of intimacy between turbulence, speaker, and reader that is at once painfully compelling and thoroughly provocative. The poem titles alone make the collection worth reading, but the danger and deftness of what will happen next make it compulsory. McGlynn’s work promises a new approach to exploring selfhood in poetry as it probes the relationship between memory, violence, and identity.
The book takes a line from Orson Wells’ The Lady from Shanghai as its epigraph: “Killing you is killing myself. But you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us,” setting up poems that are highly original and captivating, that confront and revise the boundaries of what poetry can do with disquieting ease. Murder is both question and fact from the beginning, as much as anything can be fact in 1994. It's which, how, and when that become more difficult questions, since McGlynn nimbly reveals violence to be ubiquitous and intangible, and identity to be fitful and slippery. Over the course of the collection, fragments of the self attempt to correct each other, to control or revise the brutality. This includes the act described in the title, which has happened even before the first poem, and will happen (again) with the title poem in the book’s third section. The speaker[s] tries to intervene in this unsympathetic world and her own volatile connection to history with an urgency that not only pushes the reader forward, but also implicates and condemns him in the trauma. The simultaneous presence of the threat, the act, and the absence of crime drive the poems as time is undone and exposed as unstable. The speaker must constantly grapple for reliable grounding, wading through dream, memory, and versions of the self, which, as articulated here by McGlynn, secure only the impossibility of relief. Consider the opening of the first poem “Ok, but you haven’t seen the last of me:”
I wake up somewhere in Ohio. Or, that’s how it smells—
There’s a phone in my hand. I’m thirty years old. No, the phone is thirty years old. Its memory’s been erased.
As she tries to locate herself in time and space, the speaker must constantly correct and re-situate herself in a landscape that refuses linearity and coherence. In fact, the speaker seems to be the one without memory, despite her attempts to recall the past and organize the future. “I remember her eyes, but not her name,” says the speaker. And later, “I climb a tree and look into the future.” She sees “A hope chest full of nuts, rats in a burrow. Her body banked against mine, / an obsolete piece of machinery I keep for some reason: / such hair and nails, an eiderdown coat—.“ Throughout the collection, the speaker finds and tries to use benign details to convey meaning. These take on particular and frequently unsettling resonance, articulating the violence inherent in identity and the history such identity must attempt to create and invoke to find validity.
To that end, the first section, “Planchette,” seems most concerned with reading signs, or, to put it another way, with finding any signs that might be readable. Security and constancy, whether in time, memory, or the physical world, are elusive. The note before the chapter suggests ominously, “You may not realize you are moving the message indicator, but you are.” That is, the self creates the messages it wants to find. Infused with McGlynn’s deft imaginative approach, the way presumed signs collapse in the speaker’s attempt to delve further into the unmappable past is nothing short of gripping.
For example, in “A Red Tricycle in the Belly of the Pool,” signs of childhood are transformed and unraveled: “a girl rode her red tricycle around the bottom of the pool / the pool had no water; it hadn’t rained.” The girl tries to race a mysterious someone, but she falls and scrapes herself. The speaker wonders, “would she need stitches again // there was already ink under her skin & iodine on her tongue/ or was it the other way around.” And suddenly the voice claims, “it wasn’t a tricycle.” And finally, “I’m sorry / the pool was full of water,” and everything comes undone.
In a similar way, “Where There Should Be a Plant Stand, There Isn’t” includes a literal crime scene: “my bedroom which has been roped off / with yellow police tape.” The speaker is both trapped and disoriented in her home, both powerful and powerless, and McGlynn is able to convey such seeming opposites in a balanced chorus, in grades of shadow that coexist naturally, with verve and restraint. The speaker considers stealing an old pregnancy test from the home, though what such signs really mean give her pause: “But, perhaps, like everything else, these are mutable details.” She explains, “If I take it now, I might kill myself. If I leave it / I won’t remember what I came here to do.” In poems like these, the collection takes a nuanced approach to loss and pain with a sometimes frightened, sometimes taunting, always arresting voice that insists we move on, no matter what we want to hold onto.
In addition to McGlynn’s masterful use of voice, her powerful command of form plays an important role in the collection’s attempts to understand selfhood. Poems are without controlling chronological or geographical order, or even a single consistent voice. Instead, time becomes a fluid medium as bits of the self and bits of experience try to locate each other, try to locate wholeness and the past. McGlynn plays dramatically with lineation, often using columns, indentation, and absent punctuation, all suggestive of the chaos the poems engage and attempt to organize. These formal risks are bold and challenging to the reader, but essential to the collection’s project. They underpin the violence, and their demands on the reader invite him into the speaker’s troubled world, to where everything, from blue carpet and sleeping bags to elderberry and a horse’s eye, is part of a continuous crime, and poetry’s language and lines must be limber enough to take it all in.
In the second and third sections, “Visitant” and “Revenant,” this journey intensifies. “To Be Curled in that Snail Light of Your Heathen” and “‘Would You Like Me to Walk Your Baby?’” are particular favorites, along with “Brown Study: A Girl Paces Beneath My Window” and the sublime “I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl.” Something like realization happens here, but only like. And that is as far as McGlynn will let us go. Satisfaction, and truly, real intervention, are impossible. Without fear and without apology, 1994 demands much of its reader. It makes everything you fear come true, reveals all of that to be a lie, and finds a truth that is even more startling. This is a book that hurts to read. The rawness it leaves behind lets you not just see the mystery, but feel it, in a way that bruises you past who you thought you were.