A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner
A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner, Indiana: Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2019
I just finished A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth
by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner, and it was a fascinating immersion into a world I both
did and didn’t recognize.
The chapbook appears to be composed of one long poem, broken
up into numbered sections and separate, untitled pieces. These parts of the
poem have lush, imagistic language, but they don’t aim to answer any questions;
they just offer a tense, worrisome scene with plenty of rather terrifying
details.
In the book, a woman seems to be locked up in a place that
isn’t clear. She seems to be alone, but then she doesn’t. There is a feeling
that time is passing and she is losing hope, but still paying attention to her
senses and trying to find ways to bolster her resolve:
The best she could do
was remember how fucking close
she had come
to escape
It’s easy to imagine the frustration that is the closest
thing to hope one can have in a nearly hopeless situation. Writes Hoepfner,
She had underested the wind,
the scent of some beloved
but long-lost master
(or,
on the other hand,
shivering and wakeful,
the
blood-smell
of
a dream full of teeth,
hungry but not yet desperate).
At this point, the literal was mostly lost to me (whose master?
And who smells the blood?). The best plan of action I’ve found when lost in a
poem is to lean in and accept its premises, while trusting that something will
happen—there will be explanations, or the sense of the poem will be enough, or
you’ll re-read it and everything will click. And this book captured tension better
than any I could remember, from poetry at least; it read like a thriller, but
with the deeper emotional resonance of a poem.
Something happens midway through the book and involves
blood, and it feels like a clue to the literal:
Until clotted, blood
was
as slippery as oil. […]
Her agenda was not complicated:
a quick escape
unconsciousness death
The growing feeling of fury:
She could feel
that hot, electrical tingle
like a live thing
clinging
with many teeth
There is real drama in the sparse syntax, and as a reader, I’m
rooting for this woman, and wondering who she is and what kind of trouble she
has found herself in.
All was made clear on the acknowledgments page, which
explained, “This collection is comprised of found poetry, using Stephen King’s Gerald’s
Game as a source.” In Gerald’s Game, as I recall, a woman’s husband
dies after chaining her to a bed during sex, and she is left to figure out how
to escape. I won’t spoil it for you, but the slippery blood is a relevant plot
point.
What fascinated me about this collection was how accurate
and familiar it felt to anyone who has experienced sexual violence and
domination. King’s source material was not relevant to the deep appreciation I
felt for the emotional truth and the tense quasi-narrative. Hoepfner is the
artist at work here, and she is masterful at it.
