Review: Hothouse by Karyna McGlynn

Reviewed by Sarah Appleton

Hothouse
Poems by Karyna McGlynn
Sarabande Books, June 13, 2017
$14.95, 80 pp.
ISBN: 978-1941411452

Karyna McGlynn’s Hothouse thrusts readers into a lush world where readers are both voyeur and lover. The opening, eponymous poem signals what is to come in subsequent rooms. “So you want to know where I live?”, the speaker asks, then softens her harsh question by inviting the reader to “Come here, love.” This flirtation with watching and being watched, entering a space sometimes bidden and sometimes not, permeates the collection. “You say I should become the voyeur,” the speaker states, as if we commanded it. But the speaker wants to be seen: “I want to write with the door open / but what to do about it?” Throughout the collection, however, it’s the reader who becomes the voyeur. “[Y]ou [are] so rare,” the speaker tells us, “both reader & lover fused at the stem.”

Hothouse relies on the tension McGlynn builds within and across poems, in part through recurring characters—the ex-lover, her younger self, her position in academia, herself as a writer. Once, in the Bedroom, the speaker, in bed with a lover, comes

crawling across the bed, over the comforter
plashed with huge purple flowers—to you
but not for you—for [her] fourteen-year old self reeking of
controlled heartbreak and watching [her] do it.

This visibility and vulgarity of the speaker’s performances in “I Can’t Stop Being Performative” makes the viewer squirm. “If you loved me,” the speaker says, “you would / see her there in the front row and snap off / the footlights,” ostensibly darkening from view the real-time speaker’s performance from her younger self. This self is “slow-clapping from her / velvet seat like she’s not squiggling down / into the wool of herself,” made uncomfortable by the acts of herself as an adult.

There are glimpses of the younger self elsewhere, like in “Broken Bottle of Vanilla Fields.” Although the poem doesn’t give a specific age or name the act taking place, this may be the loss of the speaker’s virginity when she was a teenager. She lies “very still and let[s] him strive against [her], the grass / prickling, plasticine.” She asks the boy, “Can you hear my heart?” and thinks, “I needed / to know it was there.” But the striving boy shushes her and says, “Trust me.” Later, an older speaker in “California King,” describes a more recent sexual experience:

His utility ululates me, strains me
of stupid, so what do I care: mouth
full, brain blunted, body a wrung
kneesock on the chairback. Wait.

While many poems touch on sexual experiences, at its core, this collection is not about sex, but rather the pieces that make up a life: defining sexual experiences and lackluster ones, a poet struggling to put out a book, breakups, what it’s like to be an adjunct. In keeping with these expected if prosaic parts of life, McGlynn uses colloquial language that captures these experiences. Reflecting on a broken relationship in “Russel Says Everybody Is Aubrey,” the speaker states, “Here he is at 34: hot but hopeless, a smart cookie who’s just / depressing as shit, sitting there breaking my heart & bumming / me out.” The familiarity of such language allows the reader-lover to inhabit the speaker’s place amidst the wreckage of her last relationship.

McGlynn builds one of her most powerful poems in the collection on these colloquialisms. “Lottery of Bad Apologies” offers a litany of excuses the speaker has heard during fights with a lover. “I’m sorry if / you felt that way, but my anger was / the lesser crime,” the lover says, and later, “You’re lucky/ I don’t leave you.” Gender and biology color in some of the bad apologies: “My blood sugar was low & I’m sorry / but frankly? You were being a bitch,” and “You’re borderline.” But rather than being an onslaught of meaningless sorries the speaker has heard, the poem shifts perspectives. Suddenly the speaker inhabits the “I” and muses, “I had to set fire to the footage / so no one else would see it & know / that I made you this way.” The nuance of these apologies belies a toxic relationship and the sensitive issue of mental health in a relationship. “I was unbecoming,” she thinks, “You tried to be ‘helpful’ / but I covered my ears: La-la-la-la-la-la-la! / I can’t hear you.” The poem concludes, “I’m sorry / that I couldn’t bear you.”

In all of the poems, the speaker reads as transparent and honest as she shows the beautiful and the beastly sides of herself, the moments when she’s at fault or out of control, and the times she struggles. “There are countless ways to dig up and diss the girl / I used to be,” she notes in “Fortune Is a Woman in Furs at the Food Bank,”

but the best and most heartbreaking
is the one where I drive my French Vanilla Lexus
to the food bank on First Hill and park it right in front.
Because I can. I’m late for drama class.

She is the woman who doesn’t take everything she is offered there, like the mothers with young children do, “[j]ust to show them a thing or two about luxury.” This is the rawest, ugliest, most shameful moment the speaker discloses by her own admission, as well as other smaller embarrassments. In “Love in the Age of Bar Paraphernalia,” the speaker “fan[s] her /shame away with the cocktail list” after her mentor tells her he can’t be her lover. Insecurity peeks through in “Caretaker,” when the speaker collects in her mouth the broken porcelain from a vase she was responsible for, and acknowledges, “I’m always doing this: failing at a task then / trying to protect the part I ruined, like something / might hatch of my mistake.” When she wanders off to the bar, she sees the stools “occupied by every adjunct professor [she’d] ever met. / Gray-faced, they turn in unison to ask, ‘Karyna, / why did you flake again?’”. She only shrugs in response.

In the concluding poem, “The Afterlife of my Lost Blazers,” the speaker finds a note in the pocket of one of the many blazers she has long since lost. “Karyna,” it reads, “you wasted so much of my time. Burn this.” And with that, McGlynn leaves us, taunting us with a hostile line, although someone else’s hostility, like the hostility of the question the collection opens with—So you want to know where I live? Now McGlynn seems to be asking—So did I waste your time? Not at all.

Sarah Appleton earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University. Her writing projects focus on memory, family, and feminism. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Kingswood School, where she lives with her fiancé and beautiful Australian Shepherd, Zoë. You can find her @sarahkapples on Twitter.