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.
Josef Kaplan is the author of POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING (Wonder, 2015), 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).