"Many of McGlynn’s poems are delicious to read, suggesting and selective. . . . From its insouciant title to its final words, this debut marks Karyna McGlynn as a poet to watch." To read the full review, click here.

"These unnerving poems leave room for humor and a more gentle sense of nostalgia, but they also display how crime and violence can fracture self and time."

"I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is a jarring read, no doubt, but soon enough, as the reader works his or her way through the book, the poems come to make their own sort of marvelous sense." To read the full review, click here.

"This book in no way feels unplanned or messy, but carefully misleading and deliberately evasive, the better to intrigue and entrance. In the penultimate poem, “I Invented the Paleolithic Circumstances Beneath This,” the speaker tells us “I leave myself a note pinned to the sheet ‘You did this.’ / I did, I invented the ash jibs of this room I cannot leave.”  We know how she feels. This book entraps us, and we thank it for the pleasure." To read the full review, click here.

"This book of poetry is all about fiction writers’ tools: plot, character, setting, and tone. . . . . I think McGlynn’s mastery of storytelling makes it what so many poetry collections are not—a compelling, can’t-put-it-down read." To read the full review, click here.

Lurid, dominated by teen antiheroes, with plenty of underage sex amid a 21st-century Southern gothic atmosphere, McGlynn's debut is at its best vivid, disturbing and fun. Despite hints and feints, it has no consistent narrative; instead, it offers scenes, asides, interior monologues, fragments and portrayals of dangerous playmates and sexual awakenings: “death & sex tickle the same damn spot,” McGlynn warns. One of her clearest and best poems of memory is called “God, I Got Down There to Get Off”: “I’m flat on my belly, hand in my jeans-/ and how to say every penny has become the eye/ of a dead relative watching me?” With her adults either inattentive or ill-intentioned, McGlynn’s strongest pages remember how she looked up to adventurous peers: “Erin with the Feathered Hair,” for example, who “unpeels my northern pretense,/ leaves me quivering in a glitter tube-top/ as she unlocks the liquor cabinet.” Conscious of precursors in popular film, McGlynn may not always avoid cliché. Yet her experiences crackle with life, and her best lines know when to stop, when to set out sexy facts and when to reach for verbal ornament, distinguishing her work from anything merely confessional.

If your powers of imagination are up to the task, then you have some idea of what Karyna McGlynn’s verse is like.  It’s like an electric twilight spinning cotton candy filaments around itself. To read the full review, please click here.

"McGlynn is an excellent wielder of language, in terms of evoking multiple connotations, eliciting tones, and offering startlingly provocative imagery." To read the full review, click here.

Part film noir, part horror flick, these innovative poems dwell in the cul-de-sac badlands where crimes and heinous misdeeds are recurring.  McGlynn, a performance poet and author of three chapbooks (including Small Shrines, 2009), offers poems in alternating views while tangling reality, time, and space.  The book’s motif is not connected to one central offense, yet each poem spins into the next to create a unified, albeit disturbing, whole.  As in a horror film, there is danger skulking in every corner, in every seemingly benign doorway.  McGlynn’s poems are often hypnagogic, balancing half in the world, half in sleep.  Along with masterly line and stanza breaks and the use of white space, McGlynn uses nuances that include poems written crosswise on the page.  One poem reads, “I cannot see / the sickness, the three seconds that will snap her / down like a switch, there / her vision cracks like I’ll always be / the thing nascent, esophageal / caught mid-gargle in the black.”  VERDICT Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.