The Meadow by Kristin Garth

The Meadow Reviews

• 
  Stephanie Parent

  A brave, powerful and technically innovative poetry collection. This book will speak closely to anyone who identifies as sexually submissive, but it will also help those who are not naturally submissive to understand that this is much more than a simple fetish or game--it's an identity, one you may want to escape at times, but that is part of you.
  
  This is not an easy read. Garth does not shy away from emotional truths that will make many uncomfortable. But there are also moments of pure beauty.
  
  So many great lines here, especially at those "turns" at the ends of the sonnets. (The entire book is written in sonnets, which is incredibly impressive on a technical level.) One of my favorites is "You thought they'd keep you once they made you tame,/but broken things do not enchant the same."
  
  This is also a visually lovely book with the arrangement of poems on the page and the line drawings interspersed throughout.
• 
  Paige Johnson

  Paced with titillating tease & release, like glitter off a cat-o-nine-tails. Stripper kisses & candy heart cute
  sapphic love. Riding crops and red spank marks, recovering anorexics and respectful harems. A carnal coming-of-age story told after an un-nurturing childhood. So, Scarlet wanders into the woods with a vengeance like Red Riding Hood (emphasis on Little), like she’s returning on the leash of the axman. Sexy! Dive into this fantasy like a sunflower-scented bubble bath.
  
  Fetish parties and tickle fights w/ a mustachioed swinger (Martin), one of many procurers of nubile flesh to bloody for branding, as Alex. Alex is classic dom sophisticate: suited, snide but soft after the requested (and extra) cruelty during his flown-in flings. It’s rare we get long prose from Garth, but it’s irresistible. Scarlet, knee-socked and ribbon-braided, wants the man (Alex) paying her way to NY and the heights of ecstasy via the lows of degradation. But in order to get what she wants, she has to fulfill her lifelong role as good girl. What is a good girl? A bowed nympho, a self-effacing sub, a love-starved and -saturating giver? Often times, all three.
  
  “She would make her mind an open field,” accept floggings and fingerings until they push her past the
  precipice of pleasure. She wants the genteelness of gentlemen to come from their disciplined style of dress and poise rather than their touch or tone. She wants to be wanted but is rather uncommunicative if not indifferent w/ Martin and questionably even Alex as a person rather than floodgate. She wants to experience all life can offer, crawl under even the meadow’s scariest serpentine brambles. She wants a daddy with a polished Oxford in each extreme realm, someone less of a dalliance like their prudish or distracted predecessors. The meadow is her safe space, a trauma response as beautiful as Alice’s
  mushroomy escape.
  
  Then we have just the selfish sex you’d expect to go down at a politician’s kink party. Silver-aged
  dominatrixes and snubbed safe-words. BDSM chat rooms where subs PM each other about the sometimes f*cked hierarchy of fetishism. Garth does a great job of explaining S&M terms for neophytes like me. The prose is so clear without being plain or boring (obviously, considering the content and signature floral violence aesthetic).
  
  If you’ve read the smaller version of The Meadow in You Don’t Want This, this is still very much worth
  reading as that was only 1/3 as big and the context is totally different. I am so thrilled with the end to have realistically progressed and mirrored my own musings/drawbacks in the hard kink community that too often writes off any complaint by distancing themselves from individuals, claiming “Oh, then they weren’t /really/ doms/subs/etc if they didn’t enjoy every second,” as though most people don’t make mistakes or aren’t malicious or self-centered or a bad match to an extent you wouldn’t learn until it’s too late by nature.
  
  Find Garth’s story in SlutVomit too and pick up Good Girl Games or Candy Cigarette.
• 
  Juliette vanderMolen

  *Content Warning: This review contains information about poetry regarding the subject matter of alternative sexual practices. It also contains external links to terminology related to these practices.
  
  

  “This pain will require a visible scar.
  This pain seeks witnesses to all you are.”
  
  -This Pain Requires An Audience, Kristin Garth, The Meadow

  
  
  The Meadow, by Kristin Garth, is a collection of brave exposure. This book is a strong box of poetry, unlocked to provide an unflinching view into what it means to be immersed in the shadow self. Garth uses the lyrical format of traditional poetry that she has become known for to give the reader a deeper look into power dynamics and sadomasochism. This is no airbrushed Fifty Shades of Grey fantasy, these are real experiences and some readers may find them uncomfortable.
  
  

  “My baby face, they fall
  for fast, those other ones who never last.
  They wouldn’t do the things you do, to hold
  my cheek beneath their shoe.”
  
  -Dirty, Kristin Garth, The Meadow

  
  
  This poem is one of many where we enter the confessional with Garth. In this instance, she points out that her desires are surprising to others. We are a culture intent on taking things at face value and not often enough engaged in critical thinking. BDSM is an umbrella term with a variety of practitioners who have kept their secrets under guard, for fear of being outed and judged. They have been right to be worried in the past. Until 2010, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) used by The American Psychiatric Association categorized this behavior as a mental illness.
  
  Although that is no longer the case, these sexual practices are still subject to stigma. Information about the subculture is often restricted to pornography and fiction that is rarely relevant when compared to real life experiences. The demographics of this group are wide and would be surprising to those not familiar with it.
  
  This poet asks us to open our minds and explains her difficulty in finding someone who really understands her. She reveals line by line the darker edge of her desires. Throughout the work, it’s clear that she’s not asking us to understand her. She is simply showing us who she is and I applaud her for that.
  
  

  “If I was your service animal, I would live on a leash.
  You could summon me when you required release.
  Good under a desk, inside a parked car,
  at your feet in a theater, wherever you are.
  They’d have to allow it. It is the law.”
  
  -Service Animal, Kristin Garth, The Meadow

  
  
  Another poem unfolds, this time less about explicit sexuality and more about the aspect of dominance and submission. The subtext is laced with her empowered desire. It is important to understand that her role as a submissive is driven by her own choice. Submission in this context is not something that happens as a result of emotional coercion or physical force. By the standards of the BDSM community, just as in other communities, a relationship with those foundations is abusive.
  
  In fact, the moment that she decides she doesn’t want to submit anymore, it’s over. Within her set parameters she is able to explore the concept of freedom through surrender. It strikes me that although in these scenarios many people would view the dominant as the person in control, the act of choice rests securely within the empowered submissive. Garth gives us the unflinching words of a woman comfortable with her desires. Her deeply authentic feminist act is to be in control of how she decides to turn her fantasy into reality.
  
  

  “Collects
  wet winged insects with an internet for
  carotid lessons for young butterflies
  who never forget the first time they fly.”
  
  -Carotid Lessons for Young Butterflies, Kristin Garth, The Meadow

  
  
  Garth introduces us to the very edge of her darkness with beautiful language. Her skill at taking what could be considered a rough subject and inserting elegance is unparalleled. This poem is not the exception. Though some of her poems are more explicit in graphic detail, they are not written with an attitude to shock. She guides us through her rough beginnings and some of the painful experiences that have shaped her into who she is today. She exposes herself in a way that expects nothing from the reader. Garth offers us the option of hearing her. She is not demanding. She is a quiet exhibitionist, beckoning willing voyeurs.
  
  The Meadow is titled after this poet’s version of sub space. For readers who are not familiar with that term, it simply refers to an altering of consciousness that is available to some masochists during the experience of physical pain. I have never heard anyone describe their ‘space’ as a meadow, which makes sense as this is a space tailored to the individual. I am not surprised that a poet would craft such a beautiful space for herself.
  
  This is a unique collection of poems dealing with a difficult subject matter that challenges both historic and modern ideals about ‘acceptable’ desires. I read this collection quickly at first, then found myself stopping through The Meadow to savour little nuances that promise to stay with me for a long time.
  
  Review first published at Mookychick Magazine, November 2019
• 
  Nick Stika

  Romantic adventure, but certainly not for the timid! Love Kristin's stories. I will return to the Meadow!
• 
  Jesse Hilson

  I had read part of this novel in the collection You Don’t Want This, which I’d really liked. I liked this too, it was a fast page turner that took you deep into one woman’s experience of BDSM land. It’s erotic as hell of course, and I don’t read a ton of this kind of thing normally, but one aspect I appreciated was the focus placed on the actual relationships between the characters as they negotiate and renegotiate their contracts for sexual pleasure and belonging. I had noted in the earlier collection how interesting (to outsiders) it was to see how sadomasochism can be seen as a sort of formal crystallization of what are unresolved emotional states between people, which have not taken on these specific physical proportions. Scarlet’s needs are very physical of course — she desires punishment and pain to take her into the “sub space” of the titular meadow — but she also needs to find individuals such as Alex the dom to in some sense protect her by controlling her. And of course it isn’t that simple. She has to go through a frightening series of ordeals that are mostly managed by him in order to seek freedom in her own life. Power dynamics and ritualized reversals build and break like waves in a psychological ocean. The submissive mindset seems difficult to adequately explain but Garth puts it front and center and makes it the necessary foreground condition of her novel as well as background. I was struck at how the scenes in the novel to my amateur eyes, always seeking analogies, resembled the balls in Austen and Tolstoy. Torture chamber societies and swinging spanking parties thronged with spectators were vividly replicated; the story was propelled for the reader who may not know the ornate rules of the game, what is meant to happen amongst sadistic men and women organizing “scenes” — or did the subs have more tacit motivating say-so than it appeared?
  
  I gave four stars because of the speed of the story, the thoroughness of what appeared to be plausibly real chapters in the life of a submissive character finding her way into this alarming mysterious world. I withheld one star because I could not help but feel that the book would have been even better if it had been formatted and presented in a more regular and uniform way. I wanted to feel like the formatting of the book had been as cared for by its editors as its main character was by her dom who paid for her airplane trips and clothes and lifestyle. Such a crucial story, obviously of primal importance and so well-told, but the packaging could have used a little more polishing. Still, a very solid, crackling hot tale of life on the receiving end of the whip and why a person would want to be found there.
• 
  Paige Johnson

  So much more than dom erotica & sapphic pleasures: subversive poetry, a literary showcase of other outwardly “mangled” types of love. As for the plot: a tech daddy’s NY harem features a vindictive brat, and two honeysuckle-sweet submissives. The MC being part of the latter, is up for auction at a dungeon as the price to pay for wandering into unlikely independence: by becoming a stripper.
  
  She’s schoolgirl-saccharine, looking for confidence in all the “wrong” places, out to prove she can make her world any which way since she’s survived so many horrors at home. But first of course is the high stakes of auctioned assault. A carnival crowd of wolves and princes… and yet the end is almost tear-inducing in its adorability!
• 
  Miss December

  Kristin Garth is brave and bold in her latest installment. It's riddled with pop culture references, heartbreaking tales of her past, and erotic memories of kinky exploits of the BDSM persuasion. I thoroughly enjoyed this one and applaud the author for letting the reader tread into The Meadow. You absolutely cannot go wrong with a book by Kristin Garth- she is unstoppable.
• 
  Lord Stabdagger

  By far one of the most profoundly powerful, deeply moving and heart crushing books I've ever read. 41 pages of darkness written straight from the tortured soul of Kristen Garth.
  @lolaandjolie
  
  From the darkness of every shadow there comes a shard of light. XXX