Mutant Dealing Factor
My blood cells---------------produce a potent antidepressant---------------blue humor sought for its unique--------------- compounds foreign to Earth's chemistry--------------- I activate by only thinking---------------nothing is unending (which I already---------------think most hours)See my arteries---------------glow & around me life decelerates--------------- Ever walked through fire unphased ---------------I singe but I do not feel If you are honest---------------you would not covet metahumanity ---------------My names are Freak Slug Sociopath--------------- Zombie My cultof fans bleed--------------- me (like the thirsty needles inside---------------clandestine genetic labs) Some who suffer---------------imagine I am strong Each of my days---------------is no more than a dead lock between my pains---------------and my "powers" a stalemate as lethal---------------as boredom I readin The Economist---------------soon neuroscience will target electricity---------------to hunt depression among neurons---------------In China a researcher deceived two lovers---------------accessed & CRISPR'd their zygote's DNA---------------when I am right here they could have asked me---------------how far I thinkwe can stretch---------------the merits of inoculating our humanity--------------- against our human pain I with this face---------------that confesses to no woe an anesthetic code---------------pulsing beneath my skin
Feature Date
- February 23, 2024
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Copyright 2023 by Northwestern University. Published 2023 by TriQuarterly/Northwestern
University Press. All rights reserved.
Kyle Dargan is the Books Editor for Janelle Monáe’s creative company, Wondaland. Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection (Northwestern / Triquarterly, 2023) will be his sixth and final poetry collection. More about his work can be found at www.american-boi.com.
A poet’s final barbed compilation that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity
The keen and jagged blade that is Kyle Dargan’s eye is drawn in Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, the final poetic compilation of a lived and inherited masculinity.
Dargan targets the armored heart, or “panzer herz”—a site where desire, violence, family, politics, blackness, and capitalism all intertwine with gender. Pierced with the question—What if the heart, in the aforementioned capacity, was not a constricting vessel, struggling to withstand internal and external pressures, but instead was a space of release?—the collection opens a cishet masculinity to the inquiries and explorations that the traditional conscription of gender discourages and often vilifies.
I long to abandon this violent / vagrancy, but the roads . . . teem with other men who know / no training, who see upon me / my teachers’ marks and ache / for the elicitation of drawn steel.
The denser blades of compassion and accountability are Dargan’s arms of choice to carry, and not conceal, the weapons he uses to probe his own heart and the hearts of the men and women who shaped him into a man that has been . . . and is unbecoming. The poetic paring of layered lines, the nicking of the process, these poems crimson the page—and not for scarlet spectacle. These versed incisions and sutures are the oeuvre dedicated to the outgrowing of the writer and the “man” that began it.
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