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

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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, author of Socialist Realism

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, author of The Switch and Extrigue

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2021 | $20

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