The poems of The Moon’s Jaw are a portrait of rotting decadence: wastelands of body and soul radioactive with death, cruelty, and a dark gleaming perverse sexuality. The language, flow, and rhythms of Rauan Klassnik’s second collection seem to revel in themselves, stagnate, bog down, wallow. As Klassnik writes, “There’s no way out but we don’t stop trying” and here, we find a wasteland spectrum, from a playground, a twisted eden that lurches forward—despite a swollen turgid gravity of blurred gender and godlessness and wheel-spinning ruts—to an obsessive and persistently striving narrative of death, gender, corruption, and (anti)religion.

from In Shadows

She borrows a knife—Circumcises her son—& walking away, throws him high up over her shoulder. Want to know about miracles? Or the triumph of the human spirit? I found her—A rabbit’s foot’s clutched in my heart like worms & shit—& ground her down into the finest dust. A body’s soaring up thru the clouds. The moon—Raising a finger to his lips. We nibbled: & gnawed. & mounted each other in cold blind light.