DANCING BACKWARDS TOWARDS PLUPERFECT by KOSS

ISBN: 9781939728661

PUBLICATION DATE: October 30, 2024

AUTHOR: KOSS

LOCATION: Doha, Qatar and Richmond, Virginia

DISTRIBUTION: Distributed by Diode Editions

 

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Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect is a poetic assemblage of a life sown outside the predictability of middle-class, straight America, one where the aftermath of repeated trauma and loss is allayed by unexpected moments of connection, empathy, and love.

 

Koss pens inventive textual routes through life transits, forging head-on through the debris with unflinching vision and grit in a timbre that shifts from existential dread to dark comedy. Part dirge and part survival story, Dancing Backwards transmutes the rubble of trauma, abandonment, grief, and suicide loss into a queer, hybrid elixir, their lived story worthy of telling.

 

Koss’s Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect opens to a humorous exchange between the speaker and a cast of variously inept therapists, setting the tone for the entire collection: a life trying, in earnest, to make good on itself, to interrogate past trauma and present grief—abuse, the death of a lover by suicide, the loss of a friend—only to be continuously spun inside the chaos of others and the chaos of self. “I am proof of my dysfunction…” notes the speaker, and later: “The world, you see/and don’t, is in flux between / Connections and short circuits.” Find tenderness within these collisions, however, and an awareness that every gesture towards healing is complicated, and made beautiful, by our own idiosyncratic thinking—“I’m a one-speed train with a lion for an engine and a cast-iron cannonball for a head”—a dance towards that tenacious singularity of self which is gnarly evidence of living.

 

—Susan L. Leary, author of Dressing the Bear

 

“I am a redneck divided by two. Here lies my tribe” declares Koss in Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, a collection of poems that reveals a broken world with original, unflinching attention. The poems disorient and disturb; they are also sharp, funny, and wide-eyed as a child. “Gays must be the salve for foul hearts” writes Koss who depicts a violence that is familiar, everpresent, but invisible. As the book progresses, the reader will find themselves affectionately attached to this protagonist who remains loving and true, who tenderly observes the forgotten and knows “how to love secretly / Lesbians are like that.”

 

—Jessica Cuello, author of Liar and Yours, Creature

 

The poems of Dancing Backward Toward Pluperfect wish, mourn, and remember. Koss reminds readers what poems do: explore what it means to be alive.

—Julie R. Enszer, poet and editor of Sinister Wisdom

 

KOSS is a queer, mixed race writer and artist with numerous publications in both print and online journals. They were published in Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Beyond the Frame, and other anthologies and won the Wergle Flomp 2021 Humor Poetry Contest with “My Therapist Sez,” first published in diode poetry. Find them on Twitter and Instagram, or stop by their website to keep track of their activities.