Gently Read Literature on Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum:
"A phrase that popped into my head after reading Lara Glenum’s MAXIMUM GAGA for the first time was ‘post-apocalyptic porno poetry’. Post-apocalyptic because the land of these poems is populated with post-human creatures that are strange mutations of animal and machine. Porno because the land of these poems is riddled with extreme sex acts and meat and teeth and perverse modes of consumption and bodily fluids galore.
Another thought that occurred to me is how it seemed strangely apt that I could abbreviate the title’s collection as MAX. GAG. In a way, this collection seemed like a vomitous outpouring of grotesque hybrids in which misshapen chunks were hacked up into different pieces, also misshapen."
And from Blake Butler:
"In 110 pages Lara Glenum has calcified the remains of what she might have in her sleep licked out of the head of one of the 1500 brains that died trapped inside the body of Gilles Deleuze's suicide, flushed from the spewmater of Lewis Carroll's brain damaged brother's long-rotten LSD baked corpse, and churned together with the sugars of recalled candy wiped out whole middle schools in Japan.
These are poems that as they create their world among the lines become banned inside the created land as soon as the land therein hears itself.
The terrain of the book is filled with malformed sexual machines, Sade-ian cartoon demons with child names like Minky Momo and Seven Cunt Mary and the Bull. There is a stage play that seems implicating in and on the poems as if by quasi-candied-dictatorial reign, which then scourges itself in and of the poems as if it is one of them."
And this is from Maximum Gaga:
"The vagina is found in divers Manners, and with divers Ornaments. Many of them provide the finest Articulations, and Foldings, for the Wings to be withdrawn, and neatly laid up inside. Occasionally the petiole embraces the branch from which it springs. The Empalement, which commonly rises out of a membranous vagina. The embryio dracunculi, it is sad, will quit the body of the vaginaless parent worm. Sometimes soldiers lie together like teeth crouching in a perfect labia. The fibers of their leg muscles are then distinguished by crenellated or adipose septa, as by so many peculiar vaginae. The vagina's variants in North America alone are innumerable, the most important being the entrance to heaven, snapping doors."
And this is Lara Glenum's manifesto:
Manifesto of the Anti-Real
1. Art is neither a form of consolation nor a butler to hegemonies. Even in its most discreet moments, art explodes.
2. The Anti-Real does not deny the Real.* The Anti-Real knows that everything is in annihilation in the Sublime. The Anti-Real is that which seeks to manifest itself through the secret side-door to the Sublime rather than through the mock world of realism.
3. Realism is the bordello of those who would have their perceptions affirmed rather than dilated. When the door of fascism is opened, Realism will be seen lounging like a whore in its inner sanctum.
4. The Apocalypse is a way of thinking. Only the Apocalyptic clock announces from atop the grotesque pile of refuse, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is now.'
5. Irony is not a device. It is a state of being.
6. To be Anti-Real is not to be Surreal. The achievement of Surrealism lies in displacing correspondences, in the poem not arriving. In the Anti-Real, all assumptions are disabled, too, with one difference: the Anti-Real displaces causal logic with a totalizing logic of violence.
7. ‘Defile! Defile!’ shriek the Obliterati as they vandalize the museum of language.
8. Sentimentality is a form of exploitation, a connivance with official lies. Hang sentimentality on the gallows of Emergency.
*Even though the Real does not exist
"Singing chorus of fetuses" doing lap dance, screaming of desire comes across the mutant sky. Prepare for the joy of the worst!
