Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection

by Kyle Dargan

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 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.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2023

About the author

KYLE DARGAN is author of the poetry collection Anagnorisis (Northwestern UP, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His four previous collections, Honest Engine (2015), Logorrhea Dementia (2010), Bouquet of Hungers (2007) and The Listening (2003)--were all published by the University of Georgia Press. For his work, he has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. His books have also been finalists for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer Awards Grand Prize. Dargan has partnered with the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities to produce poetry programming at the White House and Library of Congress. He's worked with and supports a number of youth writing organizations, such as 826DC, Writopia Lab, Young Writers Workshop and the Dodge Poetry high schools program.

Reviews

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting new-to-me poet. Has a lot to say about masculinity in connection with the women around him. I'll keep an eye out for future work.

[Jasmine. · Rating 5 out of 5]

lmao crazy that the ways to describe semen and genitals in this book rivals smut writers on tumblr