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A Ballet (or Salvos) of the Anti-Real

In the "necropolis" of The Hounds ofNo, Lara Glenum rightly proclaims: "I am Queen." And although these poems form a decidedly contemporary empire, they maintain an allegiance to an earlier avant-garde and its rigorous creation of unlikely associations to access a dream-state of art. In the unreal landscape of Brassaï's Paris, for instance, night and fog cut across familiar images of the city: shadows on the Grands Boulevards erase a windowshopper at her waist—and lovers at a small café fracture in their mirrored banquette as all sentimental notions of a romantic tête-à-tête transform into a rendezvous of disembodied heads. The Hounds ofNo, Glenum's startling first collection of poems, properly finds the source for its surprising and violent juxtaposition within this tradition. With scenes of ecstatic dismemberment, fogs of enjambment, white space and hyper-punctuation, and a dark cast of irony, the book sings the dirge of realism as it spins the dance of the surreal. But "surreal" is a blunt descriptor, since surrealism, as it is rehearsed in poetry journals these days, consists of an easy paratactical mechanics: any potentially sentimental image is quickly undercut, and stanzas take aggressive, distant leaps as if to accuse narrative of being a conservative pursuit. Lara Glenum rescues the surreal from these abuses. Moreover, she employs its tactics with original political purpose that requires a shift of terms. She will be, as she proclaims in the manifesto that concludes the book, defiantly "Anti-Real" in her response to the "mock world of realism," which has, with its narrow and totalizing views of beauty, inflicted a set of airbrushed glosses onto the female body, and which must be stripped bare. Indeed, myths of beauty and of the body are literally exploded by The Hounds ofNo. The wartsand-all ode, "Excrescence," mocks both convention