Poem Without Suffering

Author: Josef Kaplan

Publisher: Wonder Books (2015)

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.