The Moon's Jaw

Poetry. The poems of THE MOON'S JAW are a portrait of rotting decadence: wastelands of body and soul radioactive with death, cruelty, and a dark gleaming perverse sexuality. The language, flow, and rhythms of Rauan Klassnik's second collection seem to revel in themselves, stagnate, bog down, wallow. As Klassnik writes, "There's no way out but we don't stop trying" and here, we find a wasteland spectrum, from a playground, a twisted eden that lurches forward--despite a swollen turgid gravity of blurred gender and godlessness and wheel-spinning ruts--to an obsessive and persistently striving narrative of death, gender, corruption, and (anti)religion."In the wound of a stabbed cosmos, Rauan Klassnik's moon, kin to Plath's moon bald and wild, bucks against despair. Anytime we devour the queen, we will be forced to vomit her back up, a clean saint out of our foaming mouths. A pretty swell in the music. We're not afraid of the cinema, even though it houses all our nightmares. We're not afraid to die. Marble, Tequila, Rotted, Flapping. The myth of biological sex, the myth of biological stability [l]ike cathedral meat. Wrapped in a thin red towel."--Danielle Pafunda