On True Thing Each Day: Elaine Fletcher Chapman’s review of Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect
Koss
Diode Editions, October 2024

“But I’ll be honest now…” Koss writes in “The Fall of Toby and Lady” in Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, and we, her readers, believe them wholeheartedly because they spare nothing. The stanza in question with “For a long time before I knew I was queer, I thought gay meant handsome…”. Koss continues as an honest and somewhat daring writer, deeply attuned to emotion, especially when the beloved grandmother appears and takes her place in the poet’s narrative collection.

Which brings me to what Edward Hirsh in the demon and the angel: Searching For the Source of Artistic Inspiration wrote, “Art is born from struggle and touches an anonymous center. Art is inexplicable and has a dream-power that radiates from the night mind. It unleashes something ancient, dark, and mysterious into the world, it conducts a fresh light.” Koss uses language to draw vivid images that evoke the “night mind,” something “unleashed,” and they appear as seer and sayer of the seen and unseen. Their work is more than confession, more than revealing the felt and not felt, more than a vision and exploration of an unsettling world and struggle with what is real and unreal. Koss delivers.

From the first poem, “My Therapist Sez,” our full attention and earned empathy cements Koss’ authority as a poet speaking their truth. Dancing Backwards Toward Pluperfect circles around raw loss, reaction, grief and the quest to uncover and reveal the mystery of the unexplainable in plain language and in the tradition of prose poetry. As a self-proclaimed anti-form poet, Koss utilizes several forms effectively: Zuihitsu and the List Poem.

One immediately thinks about placing Koss in the company of the poet, Anne Sexton, and it may well be that Koss apprenticed herself to Sexton. Sylvia Plath gave her (Sexton) credit for the “breakthrough into the personal in poetry.” Sexton wrote to Robert Lowell, “I suppose we might have shown her (Plath) something about daring-daring to tell it true.” And in this collection, Koss dares to “tell it true” in poem after poem as they share not only family dysfunction but various ways of coping with confusion, disregard, and abuse.  The poem “Sister Story,” places us in a diner and introduces a sister, Angie. The use of a conversational tone draws us into the family dynamic: “Angie is my younger half-sister. And even though she was sometimes a brat, I found her amusing and I guess I loved her. That was the last time I saw her.” The poem continues to explain the lineage of family connection and brings into question complicated relations, attachment, and abandonment.

But the poem “Kim” anchors the book. It begins: “The thing I remember most about Kim is that she is always falling. Sometimes I am above her,  watching her body crash through the glass and bounce on the pavement below. Sometimes I’m with her, she’s laughing, and then trips and screams before she hits the glass. Sometimes I arrive afterwards, hunch over a railing, and see her splayed below like a bloody Han Bellmer doll.” The reader cannot look away from the horror and devastation that suicide leaves the living. 

The reader searches for Hirsh’s “fresh light,” in Koss’ loss after relentless loss, their “almost out of life,” the “toom” to “tomb,” list of what the grandfather owned, the “lost and found mother,” and absent father, the feeling of being “not essential.”  The first ray begins with the book’s dedication: “For Grandma. Love, forever.”  And as we hear the searching voice in poem after prose poem, and the reader remembers there is “love, forever” somewhere, perhaps fused, perhaps overlayed. One suspects and hopes light may be forthcoming.  In “Ten Things to Remember ‘Bout Me When I’m Dead,” number 8, “Made my grandparents baskets from age nine until they died. Saw grams through her last eight years.” Some light, even in the reversal of care and caring. And indeed in “The Unbearable Inertia of Clothes,” “I scuffle / aimless / haunt my house in robe and sweats / while other robes perform miracles . . .  Meanwhile, Gram’s robe still hangs on the door—/ years later         things we can’t let go.” The image of the grandmother’s robe offers some comfort to the speaker, as well as the reader.  In “Repository,” Koss writes. “Grandma I haunt your home / years later the lavender / in your drawer sings ghost / how can you be so still.” The lyrical idea connection of love echoes in “And So On in a Week (Zuihitsu)”: “making up songs in my head about my grandmother”  and “songs we made up.” Those songs are fresh light in our imaginations.   

In the final poem, “11-Month Post Suicide Vacation Poem,” Koss registers the days in a journal-like, list poem. Day 1, 16., Anne Sexton adds comfort, “happy talking about death,” and then what follows is a summing up of all the preceding events.  In Sexton’s poem, “Wanting to Die,” she writes, “But suicides have a special language.”  Koss embodies and shares that special language. This collection is a working through, a working with, surviving and even thriving through series after series of desolation with little help from the world other than love, forever.

There’s an illuminating moment in an interview on the subject of poetry and grief between Tara Brach, PhD psychologist and author of Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion, and poet, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. After her son’s suicide, Trommer says that when she began to continue her long practice of writing daily poems, she gave herself the task “to write one true thing each day.” Koss, in their bewilderment and profound loss, has written more than one true thing in this soul-shattering, truth-telling, more than confessional, collection of poems, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect. Don’t wait —just read it. Trust me, you need this book.

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Koss (she/they/them) is a mixed-race, queer poet, writer, and artist with publications in Chiron Review, Michigan Quarterly (Mixtapes), Cincinnati Review (miCro), Spillway, diode poetry, Five Points, Petrichor, MoonPark Review, Beaver Mag, Sage Cigarettes, Spoon River Poetry Review,  Gone Lawn, Variant Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, San Pedro River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Bending Genres, Bulb Culture Collective, Prelude Magazine, Reckon Review, Sugar Sugar Salt Lit, Midway Journal, and many others. They have work in anthologies including Ovation, Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Fallen, Red Ogre Review’s ’24 Anthology, Secrets in the Garden, Bone Milk II, Beyond the Frame, Dead of Winter III, Thin Places and Sacred Spaces, and Querencia’s Winter ’24 Anthology. They’ve received numerous award nominations and won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest. They made the ’24 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist and had a finalist artwork in ’24 Best of the Net. Their chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect is available from Diode Editions as of October '24. Find links to their work at: https://koss-works.com. Connect on Twitter @Koss51209969.

Elaine Fletcher Chapman is the author of two volumes of poems, Reservoir and Hunger for Salt published by Saint Julian Press and a letterpress chapbook, Double Solitude published by Green River Press. She teaches poetry, nonfiction and ongoing classes: On Keeping a Journal, Yoga Nidra & Sacred Writing© andYoga Nidra Meditation. For over 40 years she has worked as a therapist in private practice. She lives on the coast in Larkin Valley, California near Santa Cruz. Find trailers for books and poetry videos on her website. She can be found on Instagram (@elaine.fletcherchapman) where she posts photos of Life On (and off) the Lane.