Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse

Author: Dylan Krieger

Publisher: Eleven Eleven Press (2021)

Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse is a collection of new poems by Dylan Krieger published in The Collapsar, jubilat, Nine Mile Magazine and West Trade Review.

"Americans tend to sentimentalize the body. Dylan Krieger does not."

–Stephen Kuusisto

“Krieger has created an iridescent tomb of the body… I will be returning to these poems again and again.”

–Elle Nash

“What doesn’t kill you…will eventually,” says Dylan Krieger in Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse—a poetry collection inspired by living with chronic pain. The nightmare of being in a body is a shared nightmare only until pain becomes distinctive, eccentric. 'You can’t kill what I have without taking down the whole has-been animal with it.' what doesn’t kill you, I might add, only makes you want to die more. “we apologize for having bodies long before they bite back.' existence, at best, is palliative care. the only cure for the human condition is death. 'The death drive survives…prognosis: endless.' Though pain (and suffering) may estrange us from each other, they connect us to ourselves, and in self-intimacy, even without healing, even without hope, there is grace."

–Kim Vodicka

"Surgically deep. sonorous architecture. Dylan Krieger runs from nothing."

–Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich

"Stylistically, Krieger’s poetry has a rhythm like a heartbeat. Philosophically, it’s an expression of the embodied consciousness. soft-focus slaughterhouse isn’t the work of an abstract mind trapped in a body; it’s the conscious body on fire and hopelessly embedded in the world."

–Charlene Elsby