Full Description
A poet's final barbed compilation that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity
The keen and jagged blade that is Kyle Dargan's eye is drawn in Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, the final poetic compilation of a lived and inherited masculinity.
Dargan targets the armored heart, or "panzer herz"—a site where desire, violence, family, politics, blackness, and capitalism all intertwine with gender. Pierced with the question—What if the heart, in the aforementioned capacity, was not a constricting vessel, struggling to withstand internal and external pressures, but instead was a space of release?—the collection opens a cishet masculinity to the inquiries and explorations that the traditional conscription of gender discourages and often vilifies.
I long to abandon this violent / vagrancy, but the roads . . . teem with other men who know / no training, who see upon me / my teachers' marks and ache / for the elicitation of drawn steel.
The denser blades of compassion and accountability are Dargan's arms of choice to carry, and not conceal, the weapons he uses to probe his own heart and the hearts of the men and women who shaped him into a man that has been . . . and is unbecoming. The poetic paring of layered lines, the nicking of the process, these poems crimson the page—and not for scarlet spectacle. These versed incisions and sutures are the oeuvre dedicated to the outgrowing of the writer and the "man" that began it.
Contents
CARDIAC
Incision
Pericardiectomy
Diastole
Phase I
King for a Day
Diaspora: A Narcolepsy Hymn
When I Say I Want to Defund the Police
BOOK OF RUTH
Ronin
"What More Could I, a Young Man, Want"
Escapology
Traditional Marriage
Man of the Family II
Mutant Dealing Factor
Performance Studies: Gunslinger
Undertaker
Phase II
Performance Studies: O.P.P.
How I Became a Pleaser
Remedial Heteronormativity
Permutations
Her
Rhythm
Inquiry
Another Me
Performance Studies: She Asks
"The Erotic Is a Measure Between"
Incision
Pericardiectomy
Systole
Phase III
For the Man Who Caught My Father
I Scream My Throat Raw
A Man with Nothing to Lose
These Men
Chris Christie Waits Alone at Newark Penn Station
That Time I Was God
Dendrology
Since You and I Would Talk About Mars
The Venus of Slap Boxing
After People Stop Asking About Me
Phase IV
Rearview Freestyle
The Rule of Two
Mosaic Mary
Minefields
Glass, Once Shattered, Flutters Like Paper
Internal Legislation
Love Be a Slow-Moving Storm
Turbulence
Crews
Rockafella Chain
Another Way to Understand Our Fathers
Across Space and Time
Small Traveler
Adamah / A.M.A.B.
Suture
Post-op
Acknowledgements
Notes
