Poetry. In DEMOCRACY IS NOT FOR THE PEOPLE, Josef Kaplan takes up extreme forms of political speech and other "heterogeneous" discourses of the present to address the culture of advanced capitalism in the voice of its own transcendent violence. Assassination threats, the farewell letters of political suicides by self-immolation, pulp science fiction, journalistic accounts of Palestinian bombings, origami instructions, bland reports on the controversies surrounding autonomous robotic weapons systems—in DINFTP, these and other unassimilable elements become the sources for a series of errant, self-winding mashups that can neither be rejected outright, because of their powerfully sculpted quality, nor fully absorbed as artistic work.

Democracy Is Not for the People

Literature & Fiction

Kaplan, Josef

Poetry

Truck Books

Poetry. POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING is a book-length elegy, composed in slow motion alongside the path of a .224-inch, jacketed hollow point bullet—one that's been fired into the bodies of at least two children, maybe more. Combining Alice Notley with a ballistics report, Tobias Wolff with Antonin Artaud, Kaplan's relentless examination of grief evokes a poetics through which the mechanics of atrocity are indistinguishable from those of the literary imagination. At turns tender, comic, and soberingly extirpative, POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING presents a thin column of writing from within a world of ever-expanding cruelty. To have it happen, but to have it not be considered tragedy, at least not in the traditional sense, the way in which one senses form in drama as human suffering. "POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING produces catharsis of the most extreme kind, partly through the tensions it sustains throughout. To the lethal speed of bullets, Kaplan opposes a relentless durational performance. To common pieties, the exactness of forensic knowledge. To knowledge in general, its utter inconsequence when it comes to reversing the damage. Awful, and yet I'm in awe."—Mónica de la Torre "Who cares about a dead kid except for like every person on earth? In Josef Kaplan's terrific new book POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING, the 'kid' in question is painstakingly literalized. Deprived of the abstract qualities which make any kid normally the breathing guarantor of futurity, the kid in POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING is just a bunch of epigastric arteries walking around waiting to get shot. And yet if that's where Kaplan's poem begins, it's not where it leads. Through its radically unsentimental look at death, this book actually gives us a vision of life: a life which includes epigastric arteries, vacuous politesse, the gruesome spectacles of contemporary warfare, the magnificence of birth, the endlessly beautiful scenes of parents and children at play. Maybe our lives, maybe the lives of kids, are just toilets, inheriting and remitting piss and shit. Maybe this book is a song of those toilets. I mean, maybe toilets sing. I love this extraordinary work."—Brandon Brown

Poem Without Suffering

Wonder

Poetry. A rigorous accounting of the financial statuses of over 200 living poets.

Kill List

Cars Are Real

About the Author\nJosef Kaplan is the author of LOSER (Make Now Books; 2021); POEM WITHOUT SUFFERING (Wonder Books; 2015); Kill List (Cars Are Real; 2013) and DEMOCRACY IS NOT FOR THE PEOPLE (Truck Books; 2012).\nPoetry. 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

Loser

Make Now

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kaplan, Josef. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kaplan, Josef

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kaplan, Josef. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Democracy Is Not for the People

Poem Without Suffering

Kill List

Loser