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Diode Editions, 2024
“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
Diode Editions, 2024
“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
