On RED HONEY, the collected stories of Saira Viola (Fahrenheit Press, 2024)
Picture of a City’s a song by the early King Crimson;
And so it is with Red Honey, Saira Viola’s latest sex-strung stalks
Across her new neo-noir in New Yawk, LA, London,
As Barristers and Baristas and a core of coke sniffers,
H hunters, or dealers in dope prowl and walk
The splintering line between dream and desire.
Her Blood honey flows sweetly but still has the bee’s buzz
And wasp sting as her heroines heroin to escape the smeared
Clutches of men (as monkey fizz), fuming, claw at their thongs
To stir wings from lip-glossed angels who rise
From the decadence which defines them. These tall tales
Become bible for a bright but blurred following. Viola’s
Valley of the Dolls has so much more muscle than Meyer.
For him, tits were beacons but women’s bodies here
Become prize, as well as wound, as those wounded walk on
To suck cock, spit and shimmy, from Kat Sloane to Kiki,
These spermed survivors blowback on each bastard
And without kick or rabbi see each eager prick cut (down) to size.
The one page flash The Half Shell of Saturday Night is ur-text
And shows that what Viola writes are paged movies,
Neither story or screenplay, these explosions of self re-inform
Those minds doused and soused by the mediocre most master,
For here this bright mistress, a princess pocket sized can transform
What we expect of from a book. Her stories spume and then spark.
They fizz, fume and crackle, screaming at raised pitch and high dudgeon
For the sky to tear so stars tremble, or for the pavements to shatter
Like biscuit under shit and stillettos, martinis and piss, needles, fries.
If Raymond Chandler was here no doubt he and SV would write
Screenplays as he sat and scribed with Viola to make a ‘Marlowe
And Hutch for charred cities, where dares and dreams go to die.
As this slick volume subsumes what you took (or take) from the morning,
You tune into the language spoken in private code by the night.
Whether its ‘Syd began the day with a bump of coke and a scramble
of kisses between two sequinned strangers’, ‘and listened to the dirty
rhythms of the night’, or ‘a slow slung smile on her heart shaped face’
We’re transported, travelling via boobtube to a place where no pardon
Could ever restore or put right the wrongs endured by passion’s prisoners
In their sentence. And in Viola’s as she cojoins the lost worlds
Of the last five decades and back, while creating a style for the future,
Whether its combining names that glaze Dickens, such as in Seven Red’s
Loveit, Rattlewort, and Pennypick, or Chic Sauvage’s Lullu, ‘a shimmery
baguette of a woman with Rubenesque lips, lustrous movie star hair
that fanned up at the ends like a halo of black daffodills’, here are
Girl groups and girl-grouping that see the feminist flag torn and twirled.
This is one those books that burn the hands that dare hold them.
Honey drips from each sentence and from each page as sweet blood.
Readers should thus vampire. Their satanic majesties kept on rolling,
For in these tales sticky fingers and goats head soup are twin sucked.
These story-shots show a film made of fucking and faith and star fragment.
Lawyers lurch. Slander stains them. Waitresses win. Justice ducks
And the warped and wounded survive, healing themselves
In Hell’s Kitchen. The land of spunk and honey lays open and there
At its border stands Saira Viola , spreading it on toast, offering.
Come every bastard, and bite; come every girl glazed by usage.
Saira’s city-scrapes make Highrises and high risers too. Each word sings.
David Erdos 16/7/24
Magnificent review ! Really pounds its way into the bloodstream def going to check this book out now. Awesome . All book reviews should be created in verse
Comment by Lisette on 26 July, 2024 at 4:36 pm