Kym Cunningham, NEW MYTHOLOGIES: Fragmented Myths and Deviant Women
In Kym Cunningham’s forthcoming poetry collection we encounter a series of women. Strange women, with stone skin and teeth growing all over their bodies. Abstracted groups of women melding their voices together into a weapon. They merge, like the girls of fairy tale, into one image, one force, one chorus made of many voices.
NEW MYTHOLOGIES is an apt name for this collection. Each poem resonates with the air of the eternal, and yet they resonate with the now, just as all good fairy tales and myths do. Anything is possible within these pages. The narratives within these poems are often dark, confronting suppression of bodily autonomy in which outside forces attempt to pressure these women into petrifying, body dysmorphia, and writing to some complex feminist and linguistic theories. Meanwhile Cunningham’s images, her metaphors, offer the reader moments both beautiful and terrifying that seem to come from our worst and best dreams.
Cunningham disrupts and plays with reader expectation. On the page, she forces readers to reconsider words and language, sometimes forcing the words together, sometimes splitting them unexpectedly, allowing her text sometimes to sprawl, sometimes to fade, or sometimes Cunningham blacks it out completely. Cunningham writes of one of her women that “she suffered no middle language at which past and future did not merge,” and here within the work, we see that extreme language let loose. Cunningham makes it known to the readers that she is intentionally playing with a poetic tradition in which she’d been personally inspired to try out by authors of color such as M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG and Tyehimba Jess’s OLIO, exhibiting an attention to form and craft as well as a sensitivity to supporting other authors that enriches the works discussions of difference, deviance, and the boundaries they draw. The textuality of the poem forces us to confront the way we make meaning, which highlights the thematic elements of the narrative. These are deviant women’s bodies navigating a landscape that often finds them difficult, and Cunningham makes the reader feel that difficulty and aberration that is, as Cunningham so aptly put it, “the inevitable eventuality of being a girl” even if you happen to be made of rocks.
These are poems you will want to sit with. You will want to approach them at many angles, many times, and you’ll come back from them each time with a different understanding, a different reading, a different feeling. They allow for themselves to be a new creation every time they are picked up. In this way and many others, they truly are myths, eternal, yet always changing, always being created anew, whenever they are encountered. Keep an eye out for these at Dream Pop Press, coming in May. They’re a necessity for any lover of fable, fairy tale, magical realism or the very, very strange.
