[Review] - Hysteria
Hysteria
Stephanie Wytovich
Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press
I am terrified of Stephanie Wytovich. Totally not in a "I can't handle a powerful, strong-minded, outspoken, feminist woman" kind of way. I live with two of them. I am terrified of what she writes, how she writes. I have read the classics, the standards, and a ton of phenomenally talented small press horror authors and NONE of them affect me this way. Her poems capture rage and hate and lust, sin and shame and blood in a way that no other poet or prose author has been able to accomplish. This is gospel truth. She writes poems in the same way some would point a gun. There is nothing benign here. It's not going to be OK.
This is Stephanie's debut collection. For reasons not worth explaining, I have read every other collection of her poetry and read this one last. She does not write with restraint. She puts no limits on what can come out on the page, but these (being the first) seemed extremely unfiltered almost on another level. Ultimately, I think this is my second favorite of all the collections. Mourning Jewelry remains my favorite. I read this book with a little pad of sticky tags, marking the ones that really grabbed me as I went along. It wasn't long before I realized I had consumed nearly the entire pad marking the most memorable, shocking poems.
It's all here and vividly imagined. Pain and rage, madness and satisfaction, hysteria and misogyny, hatred and lust, sex and violence. All of it. The pages absolutely fucking drip with all of it.
My favorites, and I will try to prune my list a bit as I write this, were:
A Killer Recipe, Baby Bump, Blood Whiskey, Braided, Eye Appointment, Guardian Angel, Hanging, His First Time, Hysteria, Marketplace, On My Terms, Patient Limb, Pick Up Line, Resilient, Shower Scene, Signature, Tell Me I'm Yours, The Crematorium, Think Of Me.
She does this thing where the poems appear in exact alphabetical order. It almost feels like the only sane thing in an insane world. An antiseptic cleanness in an otherwise gruesome book of blood and nastiness, murder and vulgarity.
Rating: 5 Stars
Review by Well Read Beard
Twitter: @WellReadBeard
I purchased this book for review consideration.