Tag: Karla Huston

• A Theory of Lipstick

  A Theory of Lipstick
  Karla Huston
  Main Street Rag Publishing Co. 2013

  Reviewed by Bob Wake

  

  “I only write poems about sex,” begins Karla Huston’s poem “My Husband Thinks.” The poet proceeds to catalog the more quotidian concerns she insists have graced her work over the years, from “the dentist’s office” and “rotting potatoes” to “paperboys peeing in the snow” and “even the guy who stole my parking place.” But damned if “My Husband Thinks” doesn’t suddenly spring to pulse-pounding life with the lines, “Today I wrote about how the pubic hair I shaved / for you has started to twirl and bend again, / how the skin itches, the way a healing // wound does …”

  Huston has never shied away from the maddening predicament of desire, its commingling of love and spite, sacrifice and lust. She can be a brutal satirist of the tyrannical male gaze. The poem “Mona Lisa Imagines” is a stream-of-consciousness monologue of mounting irritation by the artist’s iconic model while Leonardo—“farting when you bend for a rag, / or scratching your balls”—demands prim stillness from his subject: “At least the twelve apostles could / gnaw meat off bones while they lingered / or leaned into a bit of gossip / or fingered silver coins. Today // you want my hands folded just this way.”

  

  A Theory of Lipstick, Huston’s first full-length collection (after more than a decade’s worth of six well-received chapbooks), is comprised of fifty-four poems. While not always about sex, they are never less than insightful about our shared messy humanness and the ecstasies of the natural world. The title poem, which originally appeared in Verse Wisconsin and was awarded a 2012 Pushcart Prize, is another of the poet’s masterful catalogs that blends the sensible and the sensual, this time into a rhapsody of Day-Glo images: “made from fruit pigment and raspberry cream, / a lux of shimmer-shine, lipstick glimmer, duo / in satin-lined pouch, Clara Bow glow: city brilliant / and country chick—sparkling, sensual, silks / and sangria stains, those radiant tints and beeswax liberty— // oh, kiss me now, oh, double agents of beauty …”

  Especially memorable are Huston’s portraits of small-town inhabitants whose lives have the vivid contours of Chekhov or Welty characters. They include “The Dog Catcher’s Wife” (“She’s concerned / that even the nets, nooses or tranquilizer / darts won’t save him from the angry ones”) and “Vanishing Woman” (“But now / even bad sex would be better / than none, grinding blindly into / the night, mapping the smoky / landscape with her flesh”), as well as rueful group snapshots like “Girls Tanning”:

  Stretched on benches the first warm day in May
  so sure of their beauty with their firm arms
  and thighs, their high-riding breasts, so content
  knowing that they own the world
  as the wind steals their hair and eyes, bright
  with the strain of staring into the sun,
  posing, white teeth flashing as they lick
  cherry gloss from their lips. […]

  Accessible and inviting even at its most acerbic, Karla Huston’s A Theory of Lipstick is no unproven hypothesis, it’s a fully vetted and means-tested map of the American heart and heartland.

  June 13, 2013

  A Theory of Lipstick, Anton Chekhov, Eudora Welty, Karla Huston, Main Street Rag Publishing Co., Verse Wisconsin

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• Split Personality

  Split Personality
  Karla Huston and Cathryn Cofell
  sunnyoutside 2012

  Reviewed by Bob Wake

  

  You have to admire a poetry chapbook whose self-contradicting opening line trumpets, “Now is not the time to begin …” The poem, “Digging in the Fat Box,” a kind of encomium to failed diets and body fat as symptoms of spiritual longing (“wanting / to be filled”), and the chapbook (Split Personality), are the collaborative work of Karla Huston and Cathryn Cofell, two contemporary Wisconsin poets much esteemed for their forceful individual voices. (Check out, for instance, Huston’s “Anti-Rapunzel” and Cofell’s “Opulent Copulant: Scenes from the Musical.”) Their melded persona is a hypersexualized Candide named Thigh:

  Thigh straps on a rubber penis,
  learns to dance the hustle with Ray
  from receiving, wrapping him in strapping
  tape and pushpins, she wills herself
  to squeeze, release, squeeze
  release those burning yearnings for Ho Hos
  and cheese …
  +++(“Thigh Master”)

  Emphatic eroticism and clever sexual punning (“Ray / from receiving”; “strapping / tape”; “Ho Hos”) are the central driving forces throughout Split Personality. The luridness works as a comment on the desperation of sexual desire as well as a parody of pornographic imagery:

  She once had a bikini wax in Brazil,
  a woman with long nails and eucalyptus
  made her take off her Maidenform, get down
  on all fours, arch her naked back
  like an XXX movie queen.
  Something in this position made her drop
  her guard, made her want to squeal,
  spank me hard, chica …
  +++(“She Contemplates the Venus de Milo”)

  This approach is wildly funny at times, but also, as in the final lines of “She Contemplates the Venus de Milo,” may shift abruptly to something dark and destructive within the human heart: “Cut off my hands, she whispers to the mirror, / the enormity of her own bare self.” Indeed, one of the strongest poems in the chapbook is the haunting “Makeup Girl,” which begins by illustrating the chasm between working-class reality and the photoshopped fakery of Hollywood and the fashion world. It’s a well-trod theme, but Huston and Cofell don’t stop there. They extend the metaphor into thornier territory, where we are startled to recognize our own complicity in the manufacture of self-negating fantasy:

  I’m the girl you never think about,
  the one you don’t know,
  unless the star is vexed or perplexed
  or missing a lens or dressed
  in the wrong shade of glue.
  Without me, she cannot be the part,
  and without her, I am translucent.
  +++(“Makeup Girl”)

  The twenty-two poems in Split Personality never take their explicitness for granted, nor do they collar us merely for cheap thrills. The poets raise serious questions about perception and the fracturing of our selfhood:

  If everyone in the dream is a version of you,
  then what difference does it make who shows up,
  holds a gun to your head, plays
  tic-tac-toe with your animus, runs
  a slack tongue up your thigh?
  +++(“She Dreams About Being Jung”)

  Smart and razor-sharp, Split Personality is a surprisingly rich collection that functions both as playful erotica and a critique of our worldly culture of impulsivity and instant gratification.

  June 12, 2012

  Cathryn Cofell, Karla Huston, Split Personality, sunnyoutside

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• Soundings: Karla Huston

  Our CBR review of her 2002 chapbook Pencil Test referred to Karla Huston as “one of Wisconsin’s most arresting contemporary poets.” Since then she has won the Main Street Rag chapbook contest for Flight Patterns and published Virgins on the Rocks with the University of Wisconsin’s Parallel Press. Just out for 2009 from Centennial Press is her latest collection, An Inventory of Lost Things. Visit Karla’s website for ordering info. She graciously agreed to read two poems for us:

  *

  Pencil Test / Karla Huston

  In 1969, I tucked a pencil
  under a breast and when it failed
  to cling, I went braless. Brassieres
  uncoupled, and everywhere women
  waved them like flags, filled
  incinerators with nylon and lace.
  Later I wore a nursing bra, flap
  agape, nipple pulsing while my baby
  sucked, and I wrote notes on what not
  to forget. One night the neighbor boys
  watched through tilted blinds, rubbed
  their crotches and spilled their own
  milk under a tree in the yard.
  Years later when the Wonderbra arrived,
  I tried it, felt cables and wire
  cantilevered against my skin
  to lift and point even the most
  desperate tissue. Today they tell me
  they need additional views of a routine
  mammogram. As the doctor pulls out
  the slides, some taken years earlier,
  I learn the history of my breasts.
  I stare at the brilliant panels, and there it is,
  a transparent web and outlined
  in red pencil, the sinister cell, thick
  and alarming. As I press fingers
  to the circled spot, my worst
  fears alight there and flicker.

  “Pencil Test” was published in Pearl (2003), in the chapbook Pencil Test (Cassandra Press, 2002), Silt Reader (2004) and in the chapbook, Flight Patterns, winner of the Main Street Rag chapbook contest, Main Street Rag Press, 2003.

  *

  Flight Pattern / Karla Huston

  Four mourning doves huddle atop Hemingway,
  a five by five litho hung high in the commons.
  Someone let them in, a senior prank, a tradition,
  the kids said. The birds wait captive and afraid,

  sitting on Papa’s head to roost and bobble.
  Sometimes one flies down the hall, helter skelter,
  too close to the talking heads below.
  Another searches for light through windows,

  finds only the trick of glass. Kids below
  hurl shoes, empty soda bottles, anything
  to scare up some action. The birds oblige,
  flying down and into the hall, screaming

  mercy    mercy    have mercy.
  Hemingway stares, his cap cocked, while he considers
  every word. He knows about farewells
  to arms, hills filled with white elephants, how the sky

  can become a cacophony of bells.
  This place is filled with killers, he seems to say
  and later, the birds will be shot while blood
  and feathers fall like the last day on earth.

  “Flight Pattern” was published in the Wisconsin Academy Review in 2002 and in the chapbook, Flight Patterns.

  May 13, 2009

  An Inventory of Lost Things, Centennial Press, Flight Patterns, Karla Huston, Main Street Rag, Parallel Press, Pencil Test

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