"You and I were told to swallow / our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian // and the mammalian, unless it's tame, / you know, cow-eyed,...

"You and I were told to swallow / our hexed howling, refuse the reptilian // and the mammalian, unless it's tame, / you know, cow-eyed, with a roundness eager / for petting." A powerful evocation of the feminist voice, HEX & HOWL both applies and upends textuality and tradition, parsing and refuting prior masculinist treatments of women's bodies. The poems in this collection forge multi-vocalities, some exhibiting pleasure in the parameters of the sonnet, others designing new poetic architectures through the double and multiple voicings of centos and self-portraits.

"Now we do the refusing; now // we flame in the celluloid dark." HEX & HOWL is collaborative writing at its most innovative, playful, and powerful. Muench and White allow for the creation of a chimeric construction, a third-bodied poem that engages in language-play to explode notions of subjectivity, as the "I" and "you" and "we" shift and shimmer with agency and possibility beyond the page.

Author: Simone Muench, Jackie K. White
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press, Inc.
Published: 08/24/2021
Pages: 40
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.52lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.20w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781625570178

About the Author
Muench, Simone: - Simone Muench is the author of Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry and NYT Editor's Choice; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), DISAPPEARING ADDRESS with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX books, 2010), Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014), HEX & HOWL with Jackie K. White (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), TRACE won the Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence, 2014), and SUTURE, with Dean Rader (Black Lawrence, 2017). She co-edited the anthology They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence, 2018). Her honors include an NEA fellowship, three Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry, and residency fellowships to Yaddo, Artsmith, and VSC. In 2014, she was awarded the Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, which recognizes artists for innovation, achievements, and community contributions. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois and is a professor of English at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies. Currently, she serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series.
White, Jackie: - Jackie K. White has has been an editor with RHINO, faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, and professor of English at Lewis University. She has published three previous chapbooks--Bestiary Charming (Anabiosis), Petal Tearing & Variations (Finishing Line), and Come clearing (Dancing Girl)--along with numerous poems and translations in ACM, Bayou, Fifth Wednesday, Folio, Quarter after Eight, Spoon River, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, among others. An assistant editor for They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, her collaborative poems (with Simone Muench) have appeared in Ecotone, Hypertext, The Journal, Pleiades, and others.