BY MONIQUE QUINTANA
Kristin Garth’s chapbook, shut your eyes, succubi ( Maverick Duck Press, 2019) , is both delightful and frightening, a conjuring of girlhood with a form inclined to romance-- the sonnet. A prolific sonneteer in a digital age, Garth understands that while some memories seem as distant as old TV sets and radio fuzz, certain characters are bright and alive and fun in our psyche and they turn up in the most opportune places.
This was the first time I read poetry with handwritten annotations, which added a poignant whimsy to the experience. As I moved further and further into the poems, each character seemed to be linked together by the same dark energy. In “Eat Me”, objects, fashion, and delicacies push each line to a sexual moment. There is no meek girl Alice of yesteryear, rather a woman who has autonomy in a scene. Stripped of masquerade, she dominates and commands as a true queen of hearts.
Two other standout sonnets are “ Claudia” and “Veruca Wants”. Both pieces reckon with the image and the sentiments of the brat girl, a girl decked with material things, who is much too grown-up for the world that she lives in. “Claudia” tells of Interview with the Vampire’s doomed enfant, a character who remains elusive in both Rice’s novel and the cinematic dreamscape of Neil Jordan’s 1994 take: “ Resolve to keep her safe at hand, but she / is something you don’t understand .”
The poem seems to acknowledge that we, the grand audience, both love and detest Claudia because she’s an unlikable girl, but also our beloved. Like “Claudia”, “Veruca Wants” made me take pause and look back at my girlhood. When I was small and I asked for material things or complained about things that were making me unhappy, my grandmother called me “Veruca” and waited for the sweet and stoic parts of me to return. Garth’s sonnet carries the want for decadence over to womanhood: “ Men / who’ll jump before she screams.” The sonnet plays with the idea that we create the very decadence that we need. It’s not the reaching for rich things, but when we’re compelled to articulate desire to the point of screaming.
Monique Quintana is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019) and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CSU Fresno. Her work has appeared in Winter Tangerine, Queen Mobs Tea House and Acentos Review, among other publications. She is a Senior Editor at Luna Luna Magazine, Fiction Editor at Five 2 One Magazine, and writes about Latinx literature at her blog, Blood Moon. You can find her at moniquequintana.com
