Poetry. "Rauan Klassnik's HOLY LAND is not a book for the faint of heart. His poems—dreamlike fables that conflate the domestic and quotidian with the dangerous and the perverse—are bathed in tears and blood: a trip to the bank becomes a journey to Auschwitz; bullets and gore find equivalence in rivers, birds and lush grass. In Klassnik's startling vision, 'the world knows what you want, and it knows what you need. It brings you bodies. And it brings you a gun."—Gary Young

Holy Land

Literature & Fiction

Klassnik, Rauan

Contemporary

Black Ocean

Poetry. The poems of THE MOON'S JAW are a portrait of rotting decadence: wastelands of body and soul radioactive with death, cruelty, and a dark gleaming perverse sexuality. The language, flow, and rhythms of Rauan Klassnik's second collection seem to revel in themselves, stagnate, bog down, wallow. As Klassnik writes, "There's no way out but we don't stop trying" and here, we find a wasteland spectrum, from a playground, a twisted eden that lurches forward—despite a swollen turgid gravity of blurred gender and godlessness and wheel-spinning ruts—to an obsessive and persistently striving narrative of death, gender, corruption, and (anti)religion."In the wound of a stabbed cosmos, Rauan Klassnik's moon, kin to Plath's moon bald and wild, bucks against despair. Anytime we devour the queen, we will be forced to vomit her back up, a clean saint out of our foaming mouths. A pretty swell in the music. We're not afraid of the cinema, even though it houses all our nightmares. We're not afraid to die. Marble, Tequila, Rotted, Flapping. The myth of biological sex, the myth of biological stability [l]ike cathedral meat. Wrapped in a thin red towel."—Danielle Pafunda

The Moon's Jaw

Poetry

From Schism [2] Press  Anointed in a mega prophecy of perv, a key all Klassnik, A SLOW BURNING BEACH scratches a slow-thud lullaby in the asshole of an oubliette. These episodes—blood relatives of Bataille and Bosch—autopsy a REMscape where a country club is a hospital and you can tell who’s a killer. This is the narrative fallout of plz be gentle. This is necrolore with a strap-on of poetry. All the ways to die. To be tortured. In this slashed paradise to the max—the civilizing byproduct of subjugation—there are herds of assholes singing. Poignant in its policy-as-usual portrait of humanity wanting, Klassnik’s I am a good person dying clenches the existential corpse anew. Bask in this book. There is enough sun—yes, sun—piercing through the brutal and senseless scaffolding to darken any dreamskin. Kim Gek Lin Short The dystopia in Rauan Klassnik’s A Slow-Boiling Beach is apocalyptic and sexual (“The menace is total”), and men and women alike narrate the horrors. This is a more intimate news cycle in which “you” are an actor, as responsible as anyone for the state in which we find ourselves. “Plz be gentle,” a voice speaks—but the situation is dire: “Shaking in a ditch, alone in a filthy motel.” Klassnik’s vision shows us the slow-moving end of the world in a series of terrifying vignettes that, as we read, begin to normalize into a recognizable, barely surreal, now. Janet Holmes  A Slow Boiling Beach is a joy to read, a dadaist extravaganza, a rumbustious fiction on, among other things, language, in a tongue that sometimes seems tantalizingly close to our own, featuring dogs (innocent, mutilated, euthanised, beheaded) and assholes (object of love and wormhole to the heart) and a pair of lovers. Meaning slides, torques, twerks, and escapes. The texts tease you with snippets of narrative (that in the moment are romantic and seductive), lines of dialogue that seem to hint at story, only to be subsumed under images of horror, suicide, child-molesting, animal torture, which now and then modulate into something approaching hilarity: a choir of singing assholes, aliens masquerading as cows on a green hillside, an anus-soul floating over green hills. This book is an exhilarant linguistic performance, a wild and elliptical meditation, a thing of scrofulous jubilance and dark signs. Douglas Glover Rauan Klassnik writes probing poetry. His tonalities are galactic and idiosyncratic. Slip-sliding subjects stacked on top of each other. There is brutal intractability here: "An orgy that will not die." Impish, wacky, offbeat, this is a poet of daring creative leaps. The asymmetrical expansiveness of poems/texts in A SLOW BOILING BEACH is riveting. These poems energize my faith in poetry. Pay attention to this renegade and his work! Uche Nduka

A Slow Boiling Beach

Independently published

The Birth of Venus

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Books by Klassnik, Rauan