KAPLAN, Josef
Poem Without Suffering

A book-length elegy, composed in slow motion alongside the path of a .224-inch, jacketed hollow point bullet—one that’s been fired into the bodies of at least two children, maybe more. Combining Alice Notley with a ballistics report, Tobias Wolff with Antonin Artaud, Kaplan’s relentless examination of grief evokes a poetics through which the mechanics of atrocity are indistinguishable from those of the literary imagination. At turns tender, comic, and soberingly extirpative, Poem Without Suffering presents a thin column of writing from within a world of ever-expanding cruelty. [publisher’s note]

Josef Kaplan is the author of All Nightmare: Introductions, 2011-2012 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), Kill List (Cars Are Real, 2013), and Democracy Is Not for the People (Truck Books, 2012).

Published by Wonder, 2016
Design by Josef Kaplan
Poetry