50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse

by Karyna McGlynn

Overview

This is a book of tragicomic gurlesque word-witchery inspired by the Kate Bush cosmos. Campily glamorous, darkly funny, obsessively ekphrastic, boozily baroque, psychedelically girly&musically ecstatic, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse dazzles as Karyna McGlynn's third collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946448958
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Karyna McGlynn is a writer, professor&collagist living in Memphis. She is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009) and Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), which was a New York Times Editor's Choice. Karyna holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in Creative Writing&English Literature from the University of Houston. Recent honors include the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, a visiting professorship at Oberlin College, the Rumi Prize for Poetry selected by Cate Marvin, and the Florida Review Editors' Award in Fiction. With Erika Jo Brown, she's co-editing the anthology Clever Girl: Witty Poetry by Women.

Read an Excerpt

A Real Artist Makes Us Fall in Love with Ghosts

How could you leave me when I needed to possess you?
—Kate Bush, “Wuthering Heights”

I’m such a Scorpio. I want to haunt you into loving me.
I want the heavy lace hem of my nightgown
to brush your bare feet with fresh dew from the moors.
I want you to spend the rest of your life
hearing my song ripping through chimneys,
my mad footsteps pacing the attic above you,
my best dress: a plume of plasma descending
the stairs to a coronation that will never happen.

I’m running my icy fingers down the length of
the verso. I’m tapping lightly
on the paper that divides us.

If you heard it, I need you to know:
I have a way to cut a door
in the poem&step through it.
It’s just this sheet that divides us.
It’s just nothing.

I see you.
You can warm me.
Will you let me in.

Table of Contents

Waking the Witch

A Real Artist Makes Us Fall in Love with Ghosts 1

If You Ask Peter Gabriel to Astral Project 2

The Girls I Grew Up with Were Hard 3

Love Poem When We Run Out of Chickens 5

Halloween in the Anthropocene 7

Application to Model for Helmut Newton 9

How to Die in Your Dreams 11

You Must Wake Up 13

Witches Be Everywhere 15

A Coral Room

I Was Born in a Cloud 19

We Sing Mozart's Requiem in the Back of the Cruiser 20

Only Two Things Will Save Us Now 23

This Was Supposed to Be an Ode to Aqua Net 24

You See, I'm All Grown Up Now 26

Where to Stash Your Wax Lips 27

I Thought No One Would Ever Love Me 29

On the Dubious Honor of Being Prettiest 31

No Corroborating Evidence 33

It's Sadder If You're a Girl 34

Pull Out the Pin

50 Inciting Incidents 39

Sometimes a Guy Named Kevin Launches His Raft in Your River 41

How to Talk the Manic Away 42

Golden Age Drinking 44

Fun Factory 47

I Stand Outside This Woman's Work 49

I Wake Up in the Underworld of My Own Dirty Purse 52

How to Stop Raping the Muse 55

Wow

Come Up & Be a Kite 61

Tiffany Conditioner 62

If Your Glamour Is Real 64

White Dress vs. Red Dress 65

50 Other Words for Snow 67

If You Keep Hitting Those High Notes 69

Nature Is So Melodramatic, Always 70

If Our Art Must Outlive Us 71

Notes 75

Acknowledgments 81

Editorial Reviews

2023 Finalist for the Lammy Awards in Bisexual Poetry

A Real Artist Makes Us Fall in Love with Ghosts

"Karyna McGlynn’s poems have an addictive quality....They smack me into delirium, and again into delirium’s comedown. When they smack me into delirium’s hangover, accompanied by the silence that echoes after each heart-stopping ending, I am too greedy not to turn the page for another fix. 'That’s the best part: it continues,' McGlynn writes."
—The Adroit Journal

“The poems in Karyna McGlynn’s 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse are like those spectacular mixed cocktails that carry our troubles away: they are spiked with the oddest ingredients and supremely intoxicating. I love their daring, their deep-diving humor. McGlynn’s poems remind us poetry can be fun. But only in the most devastating way.”
—Cate Marvin, author of Oracle and Event Horizon

“These poems are interdimensional requiems, all of them belting, scratching, remixing, and reframing the way we view love, art, authenticity, and Being. McGlynn is a technicolor troubadour for the 21st century. With power ballads and astral projection, through portals and trap doorways in time, she conjures past selves for a final reckoning that is both ferociously funny and tragically glam. Mercy, is this book magic.”
—Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer

“In 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse, Karyna McGlynn is as wonderfully witty and irreverent as ever. She offers an exquisite poetics of girlhood, a celebration of teen femme aesthetics, an embrace of witchy weirdness, and a rage so hot it burns at the edges of the page. These are poems with teeth and tenderness and so much knowledge. You’d overlook their sharp, glinting beauty at your peril.”
—Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The Witch of Eye and RUE

“These poems pulse with fun and openness, but pay close attention to how this book extends McGlynn’s argument about the nature of poetry and how it intertwines with popular culture, class, money, sex. As at any party, you are eventually dragged to the mirror for truth checks, to ask, ‘Is Your Glamour Real?’ and, if you read this book, you may get to answer, ‘the cosmos blinks once for Yes.’”
—Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City

“‘I packed my navel in a crate & gave it / to charity so I wouldn't stare at it,’ the speaker says in this fizzy, delicious, and defiant collection of poems about the melodrama of girlhood and coming of age as a Kate Bush in a Britney Spears world. As adults, ‘[we] stopped scaring ourselves / on purpose, stopped wearing our Weirds / on our Outsides.’ This book is for anyone who remembers Mudd jeans, who knows Wuthering Heights is a romance, who was told by her teacher to stop talking so much. ‘It's Sadder If You're a Girl,’ the speaker tells us, ‘so consider becoming one / before you die.’”
—Leigh Stein, author of Self Care and What to Miss When



Past Praise:

“McGlynn’s first book, the fabulous (and fabulously titled) I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, proved that she belonged squarely in the Gurlesque, a loose group of female poets who—combining the burlesque and the grotesque—approach their femininity in a campy way, skewering gender stereotypes. Now, in her glittery, screwball second collection, McGlynn continues to play with the dark comedy afforded by this girly kitsch. . . . Often conjuring the voice of a femme fatale, these cinematic poems are as entertaining and upsetting as ‘a ruinous sort of hide-and-seek in which / the hider goes to live in another house, / or disappears altogether.’”
—The New York Times, “Editor’s Choice”

“She has the instincts of a stand-up comic; she’s always telling a story, making bold statements, making fun of herself, or taking some dark stone out of her pocket and handing it to you. She’s invested in these poems as social experiences, which is refreshing.”
—Kenyon Review

“Playful, fun, and morbidly dark, McGlynn’s poetry takes readers through a journey of rogue justice and karma-balancing—the kind that only exists in the deepest annals of your subconscious.”
—Bustle, “15 of the Most Anticipated Poetry Collections of 2017”

“[McGlynn’s] second collection delivers, luring readers into a world bawdy yet bright, macabre yet full of magic, and vulnerable yet sharp. . . . McGlynn’s poems masterfully explore the dangers—and wonders—of womanhood, sexuality, and insecurity. . . . These poems, whip-smart, crackling with candor, and pulsing with effervescent language and plush imagery, demand to be read aloud.”
—Booklist

"Karyna McGlynn’s Hothouse thrusts readers into a lush world where readers are both voyeur and lover."
—The Los Angeles Review

From the Publisher