Rauan Klassnik’s short, terse prose poems are packed like pipebombs upon the page. His earnest battle to communicate detonates a series of raw, uncensored explosions of expression full of violent beauty. As the title suggests, the poems struggle toward redemption while slogging through blood. Along the way, the sorrow makes the joy Klassnik inevitably finds that much sweeter.

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.

Rauan Klassnik’s short, terse prose poems are packed like pipebombs upon the page. His earnest battle to communicate detonates a series of raw, uncensored explosions of expression full of violent beauty. As the title suggests, the poems struggle toward redemption while slogging through blood. Along the way, the sorrow makes the joy Klassnik inevitably finds that much sweeter.

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.