Hex & Howl
Hex & Howl is Simone Muench and Jackie. K. White’s collaboratively written chapbook of protests and spells aimed at countering forces of oppression, specifically as they are manifest in the objectification and violation of women’s bodies. Employing rhyme, homophone, assonance, alliteration, and driving metrical units such as the spondee, these intensely sonic poems enact the call for both resistance and rebirth.
The single-syllable word “Eve” fuels the poem “Against Teleology” to interesting effect: “They made Eve an event, a teleology / we’ve teethed too many mouths upon, jawing / uneven through supposed apple skin. We’ve / seeded and ceded enough.” While “Eve” emerges as both the conceptual and aural focal point of the poem, the recurrence of the name also creates a set of constraints against which the poem sometimes chafes. Indeed, the poems in this book often seem to bounce against their own limits, with the reader left suspended on the cusp of something big that never fully pans out.
The tension between entrapment and liberation can, however, open the poems up, as is apparent in the first few lines of “Portrait as Landscape: Shell Game”:
She’s silk static and wetsuit smooth
A shawl of dark water, opaque glass
Comet, eclipse, fiery veil, a sealed record.
Add gloss to gumption, and she’ll beplum-sauce sweet machete ready.
The opening images are cohesive, like a shell—smooth, opaque, dark, fluid. The figure of the woman is contained within “opaque glass.” Yet immediately Muench and White interject with the disruptive, nearly mystical appearance of a “comet, eclipse, fiery veil”—as if to suggest the woman is moving freely through the universe. In moments like these, the poems feel expanded, rather than limited, by their formal strategies, the poems, like their subjects, teeming with possibilities.