Poem Without Suffering

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Poetry. POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING is 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. To have it happen, but to have it notbe considered tragedy, at least not in the traditional sense, the way inwhich one senses form in drama as human suffering. "POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING produces catharsis of the most extreme kind, partly through the tensions it sustains throughout. To the lethal speed of bullets, Kaplan opposes a relentless durational performance. To common pieties, the exactness of forensic knowledge. To knowledge in general, its utter inconsequence when it comes to reversing the damage. Awful, and yet I'm in awe."--Monica de la Torre "Who cares about a dead kid except for like every person on earth? In Josef Kaplan's terrific new book POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING, the 'kid' in question is painstakingly literalized. Deprived of the abstract qualities which make any kid normally the breathing guarantor of futurity, the kid in POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING is just a bunch of epigastric arteries walking around waiting to get shot. And yet if that's where Kaplan's poem begins, it's not where it leads. Through its radically unsentimental look at death, this book actually gives us a vision of life: a life which includes epigastric arteries, vacuous p