W. Todd Kaneko
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the poetry books This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies (New Michigan Press 2020). He is co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, which will be published in 2021. A Kundiman Fellow, he teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Photo Courtesy of Tyler Steimle, Photographer
Books
Slash / Slash
Publication Date:
June 2021
The collaboratively written poems in this chapbook explore identity, masculinity, fame, and music. Partly a mythologized biography of heavy metal guitarist Slash, partly a fictionalized story of the complex relationship between Slash and his longtime bandmate Axl Rose, these poems dive into unanswerable questions. What does it mean to be larger than life? What matters more: the music you make or whether someone is listening? What is the difference between who you are and who you become?