THE RIOT GRRRL THING
by Sara Larsen
If the lyric tradition and literary history were a punk show then Sara Larsen’s The Riot Grrrl Thing would be a leather jacket-wearing, zine-making, raspy-voiced cry “girls to the front!” It was the 90s in Philly and New Jersey, it was Ancient Greece, traversing and transcending time and space, “it was messy. It was art. It was libidinal.” The Riot Grrrl Thing is what happens when women revolt, refuse to be managed, and instead “crash in RAGE WAVES” against a world rife with violence and constraint, against a realism that is “really hard / and rather / unsatisfactory.” This collection is riotous in every capacity: both a hilarious, blunt reflection and an incisive political disturbance of the status quo.
Larsen’s polyvocal text carves out a punk lyricism and epistolary network connecting Sappho, Kathy Acker, Amy Winehouse, Bikini Kill, among other delightfully abrasive women. Larsen is not interested in making a new canon; rather, she rejects any precious and pure canon in favor of an ongoing, messy concert of voices and bodies. Larsen invites the reader to dance, revel, and inhabit an uninhibited punk femininity that aggresses heteronormativity, conformity, and bourgeois respectability.
Larsen holds at center stage the “UnManageAble /crux of femme” and pushes us to the brink of poetics, punk, and anarchism, the point at which rage meets ecstasy to beg the question: “how do I fight / for my joy.”
The unmanageable, the femme, the DIY punk ethos loudly swirl and reverberate throughout this book, giving way to the scrappy battle: the aggressions of respectability and patriarchal domination, in one corner, and, in the other, queer femme punk insistence, “a fucking trash goddess.” Larsen gives us the unbridled gift of a girlhood that is not dainty, quiet, receptive but instead a space where one is able to own oneself, one’s body, and then disavow ownership as one disavows “patriarchy, capitalism, violence, being an object.”
Larsen deftly animates the anti-capitalist politics of how words get from one place to another—on papyrus, through zines, through mixtapes. She elevates the handmade, community and art and declares “I will not die.” Bacchic revelry and political precision invigorate the reader to dance, thrash, and create against patriarchy, sexism, and capitalism, to never stop thrashing and trashing, to refuse to be manageable. Larsen’s work resuscitates the abrasive vitality of the Riot Grrrl: “I’ll resist with every inch and every breath, I’ll resist this psychic death.”
“To read Riot Grrrl Thing is to participate in what is, and can only be, the Riot Grrrl Thing—a condition of vivacious unlimiting. The brilliant Sara Larsen knows that thing firsthand; I can only know it imaginatively, linguistically, and in awed recognition of its exuberant, and it would seem ancient, power. Sappho did the Riot Grrrl Thing, and she was not the first, nor will Kathleen Hanna or Janis Joplin or Kathy Acker be the last. Every bad-assed magnificent spirit refusing to serve as amusement or servant does the Riot Grrrl Thing as she rambunctiously plies incessant skepticism and supplies wild altruism. Larsen’s book is pissed off, playful, excessive, erudite, and free. Read it and feel the whole of it.”
– Lyn Hejinian
“Sara Larsen’s The Riot Grrrl Thing is a poetic punk text which purrs and shouts with ‘Sappho and her friends’ and sings what is under sung. This book uncovers the power at play in memory—who gets the power to name and the prerogative to remember, and who gets the glory of being remembered. In our present where ‘the soul of the city is gone they have eradicated it with money,’ Larsen relishes being ‘an enemy of the forms of this world.&rsquo' This is poetry that follows Sappho's dictum ‘I say it is what you love.’ The scenes and syntax are tough, rowdy, tender, sexy, and unabashed. The Riot Grrrl Thing powerful and bardic, soaked in memory and dreaming of a different future, asks again and again ‘how do I fight // for my joy.’”
– Alli Warren
“Sara Larsen writes a poetry against numbness, of punk renewal, of keeping grief alive, and outrage. Remember Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, remember Kathy Acker, remember Anaktoria. ‘Bring up light/ in the form/of a sister.’ History is a sister’s weapon and her body, the ‘nasty companion that carries liberation’s spring.’ The Riot Grrrl Thing is a transformation of bullshit to honey, a zinesque lament through which abjection is elevated to capacious multi-love object. Wow. Call this book a positive-negative love charge and sustenance for the future-kairotic events of resistance. Read these Sapphic punk- paratactic get-real beyond realism poems! Take energy, take heart from the revival of this question, ’What does it mean to be a Riot Grrrl?’”
– Carla Harryman
Sara Larsen is the author of THE RIOT GRRRL THING (Roof Books, 2019), MERRY HELL (Atelos, 2016), and All Revolutions Will Be Fabulous (Printing Press, 2014). She is also the author of several chapbooks including Riot Cops En Route To Troy and The Hallucinated, among others. With David Brazil, she edited over sixty issues of the literary zine TRY! from 2008 to 2011. She lives in the Bay Area.