Book Review: Mega-City Redux by Alyse Knorr
Reviewed by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
Mega-City Redux
Poems by Alyse Knorr
Green Mountains Review Books, February 2016
$15.00; 62 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9963342-2-8
As the author notes, Mega-City Redux is a “remix of and response to Christine de Pizan’s 15th century proto-feminist allegory ‘The Book of the City of Ladies.'” It’s certainly that, but it’s also so much more. Not content to merely reframe, Knorr troubles the landscape she creates, claiming women’s sameness of experience even while she complicates it. A series of justified poems mix poetry, prose, and play structures to encompass the seemingly inescapable pressures exerted on women. Winner of the 2016 Green Mountains Review Prize for Poetry, Alyse Knorr’s Mega-City Redux astounds with logic that’s “deadly, when it’s not foolish. When it’s not logic at all.”
The volume’s unnamed female narrator guides readers on a first-person journey in the form of a girls’ trip with Dana Scully, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Xena, Warrior Princess, as companions. Each of these women has a role to play: “Reason, Rectitude, Justice, and hopeless Love.” It’s love that unites the narrator with these other “Girls in Love with an Idea.” They travel together, looking for the famed City they imagine as
an armory
packed ceiling-high with steel, stable full of
black horses with black manes and black
eyes, laboratory spilling with sexy dry ice
fumes, statues of women chiseled by women
using marble quarried by women from a
bottomless vein discovered by women, sex
toy palace of pinks and purples, open air
markets where the currency is only giving,
street after street of library towers peaking
like multiple orgasms, and a map where
every last alley, every brink and cornerstone,
is called Truth.
Pursued by their own histories and the Chorus—an entity that scolds, blocks, and shames them in equal measure—these women are “equally damned and lost” as they cover a lot of ground looking for that mythic place where they’re not only allowed to be but where they belong.
Mega-City Redux is a book about society, traditions, women, and, perhaps, even more particularly, the gaze. In Knorr’s hands, there’s something slippery and eerie about all of these. Unease rests just below the surface of these neat categories. The tension’s often felt in the way the gaze asserts itself as both of and on the various characters—inescapable, problematic, poignant, and necessary. In poems like “We are wearing:”, the “we” lists Xena, Buffy, Dana, and the narrator’s attire; this slyly subverts the gaze’s power by making its objects the subject. Yet, the gaze can also be individualized, as seen in several poems called “Atom Hymn,” self-reflective vignettes about times when each woman became aware of her own particular difference at an almost molecular level. Knorr plays with what it means to see and be seen. Whether it’s the knowledge that “at least one party will know, will gaze—,” or the posse’s foremothers looking “down at us, confused as we are about the lines between self-esteem and profitable shame,” or the narrator herself “gazing. Objective and / objecting,” for Knorr, “it’s the seeing that counts.”
Beautiful and wily, there’s a facile poetic voice at work here. Poems tackle romantic love as easily as gallows humor, pop culture as easily as literary canon. Whether it’s on the level of diction or ideation, Mega-City Redux enfolds high and low culture into something that’s intimate, immediate, and conversational. Charlotte Perkins Gilman melds with Virgil as the group journeys to an underground speakeasy in search of an oracle located within the speakeasy’s yellow wallpaper. The “wallpaper starts to shift. / Stems of flowers go asymptotic, leaves split / in half, and wall becomes hinged, unhinged, / doored—an open black tunnel inside.” Yet Dana Scully ends the scene: “Flashlight out and deep into the Unknown, / [she] plunges in ahead, believing and believ- / ing despite us.” The integration and contrast of iconic literature, and its modern, small-screen counterparts, makes both the players and the action of their play seem timeless, as if each poem’s tensions existed and will exist long after the poem’s particulars fade.
Unabashedly about women, Knorr’s Mega-City Redux elegizes, probes, demands, and celebrates equally. The narrator’s search for the fabled City is as relevant now as in the 15th century. Knorr’s vision brings recognizable, shocking, everyday intimacy to the long struggle of women to exist within themselves and the larger society. Again and again, these poems ask history for something better. Yet, in the end, they also know, “The world is as safe as it ever will be.” Elegy and celebration, indeed.
Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers earned a B.A. in English from Penn State and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Old Dominion University. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Gemini, The Missing Slate, The New Poet, Gulf Stream, IthacaLit, and Menacing Hedge, among others. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in Flash Fiction and was a semifinalist in the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and the 2016 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. A native of Pennsylvania, she currently resides in Buckingham, Virginia.
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