The Moon's Jaw
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.
Rauan Klassnik was born in South Africa and moved to the United States when he was thirteen. For many years he traded collectibles, cards, beanie babies, and the like. He then spent many important years in Mexico and now lives in Kirkland, Washington with his wife Edith. He is the author of Holy Land, also published by Black Ocean, and the chapbooks Ringing (Kitchen Press) and The Sea (Mud Luscious Press).
