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    Romance or the End: Poems
    Unavailable
    Romance or the End: Poems
    Unavailable
    Romance or the End: Poems
    Ebook121 pages26 minutes

    Romance or the End: Poems

    By Elaine Kahn

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

  • Beloved poet Elaine Kahn uses both words and their absence to tell a cohesive story about love, hurt, heartbreak, trauma, and an attempt to heal. Her use of structure to paint emotion is visceral: white space, formatting, punctuation and more ask the reader to literally read between the lines, to fill in the gaps and become an active participant in the poems' narrator's experience. Her pauses (re)create confusion and disorientation and meaning; her spacing is the scaffolding in so many of her poems
  • The poems' layout and overt white space comment on the spaces around truth, around lies, and refract repeating titles, imagery, and themes.
  • Elaine's project is in part to defamiliarize "romance," to call into question whether intimacy and truth are possible in relationships (and their aftermath)
  • One of Elaine's main talents is her imaginative concision; she pares back until every poem is a sharp point. She is also unafraid of bluntly presented paradoxes, and holds space around them for the reader to experience
  • Romance grapples with topics of sexual assault, trauma, romantic relationships and their (often painful) end, sexuality, and more, while still allowing room for interpretations and plurality of meanings

    Bookseller Praise for Romance or the End

    "When paired with its contents, the title of this collection alone can generate so many interpretations. Is this the End of Romance? Is Romance the End goal? Are these things disguised as each other, one and the same? These sparse and powerful pieces communicate the duality of hyperemotion and the feeling of nothingness. What isn't said is just as loud as what is. Kahn's latest collection is my favorite sort of poetry—a little sardonic, a dash of cynicism, and peppered with wit. She just Gets It. Readers of Melissa Broder and Megan Boyle will find a lasagna-shaped space in their heart for this selection." —Andrew King, University Book Store (Seattle, WA)

    "This is slash-and-burn poetry, with lines as economical as a knife wound. Elaine Kahn holds nothing back but never wastes a word, allowing seething eroticism to creep through the white spaces on the page." —Grace Harper, Mac's Backs (Cleveland Heights, OH)

    "Kahn’s latest collection of poems are a cutting exploration of the themes of love, relationship, and what happens when those things implode. Every poem works in tandem to form a fractured narrative as Kahn plumbs the depths of what romance is, and if such a thing is even possible without crippling compromise. Confrontational, sometimes bleak, and always incisive, Romance or The End is a multifaceted collection that will stick with me for a long while." —Caleb Masters, Bookmarks (Winston-Salem, NC)

    "You will get to the end of Romance or The End in an hour, every sparse word surrounded by a vast space on the page imbibed with a thrilling confidence in every word’s sting, and you’ll turn it back to the beginning to see the vastness transform into something like healing, and it’ll take days, weeks, months, lifetimes to tease it all out." —Luis Correa, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)

    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSoft Skull Press
    Release dateFeb 4, 2020
    ISBN9781593765859
    Unavailable
    Romance or the End: Poems

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