Loser

Poetry. LOSER is a book of two monologues in which the speaker experiences the total destruction of everything they have ever loved.

A contemporary epic depicted in thready; minute detail; Josef Kaplan's LOSER makes the cheerful assertion that we are all already doomed. And yet; extinction is too easy a beauty. Existing somewhere between the extravagant nihilism of Gregg Araki's CHOOSE DEATH stickers and grandiose theories of the rev; Kaplan does a complex two-step in the narrow margin of collective subjectivity. Playing out the contradictions; pleasures and paradoxes not of pure revolutionary activity; but of what it means to continually fail at revolutionary living; Kaplan exploits the easy slipperiness between Crimethinc.-esque illicit action and carpentry-as-hobby; ally and foe; conspiratory friendship and the smugness of a non-profit liberation still tied to classic rock; crossfit and the strictures of a capitalist world order. Pointedly; for Kaplan; our shortcomings exist equally in the drama of tactical deficiency and the dailiness of choice. Implicating us in the steaky enjoyment of a farm-to-table dinner and the meaty rot of suffering human bodies both; LOSER is a funny; moving acknowledgment that imagining a better world is also knowing all the ways we have inevitably already been defeated. That this knowledge is; in fact; the foundation of doing the work that really matters; even if we fail. And that continuing to fail together could mean the slimmest chance that--dare I even say it--one day we might win.--Trisha Low

Across the two cascading; Karamazovian poems that comprise LOSER; Josef Kaplan fans the spark of revolution in the face of doom; that catastrophic thing we've learned to accept as the present. Kaplan offers a sinuous depiction of moral perception as it aims to imagine--through a ribald performance of defeat; and a coiling; frothing-at-the-mouth apologia--political mobilization and alliance. With unassuming tenderness; these poems remake the world; 'where / defeat / makes / possible / the shape / of whatever;' by turning nostalgia into dust; and resentment into something far stranger and richer--something like a promise.--Shiv Kotecha