
Koss Poetry & Art
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Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect – Now Shipping!

Dancing backwards towards pluperfect
by Koss
Published by Diode Editions
Shipping in October 2024
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect is a poetic assemblage of a life sown outside the predictability of middle-class, straight America, one where the aftermath of repeated trauma and loss is allayed by unexpected moments of connection, empathy, and love.
Koss pens inventive textual routes through life transits, forging head-on through the debris with unflinching vision and grit in a timbre that shifts from existential dread to dark comedy. Part dirge and part survival story, Dancing Backwards transmutes the rubble of trauma, abandonment, grief, and suicide loss into a queer, hybrid elixir, their lived story worthy of telling.
Blog Posts
Calves, a Crossword Poem
Another crossword poem (or the crossword list). Graphite and liquid graphite on mounted crossword poem.
Schuylkill Valley Journal | Dispatches | Publication
Very happy to have this experimental writing, Because You Are Gone: I Dream You Laughing in Schuylkill Valley Journal Dispatches. When Schuylkill editor Rob Kaniuk wrote me and said it was “kick ass,” it confirmed my suspicion it was finished and gives me the confidence to stay strange (and experimental). Schuylkill’s Dispatches is an online […]
Chiron Review 124 | Poetry
Very happy to have poems in Chiron Review 124. Love this cover art. Chiron is a 40+ year-old lit mag publishing writers like Marge Piercy, Lyn Lifshin and Charles Bukowski. It was created by Michael Hathaway in 1981 and was published in a tabloid format, as many journals were then. I’m so thrilled to be […]
Gone Lawn | Koss | Zuihitsu Poem
Thrilled to have poetry in Gone Lawn #42. Thank you @OwenKaelan and @amygcb! There are lots of great writers in this issue. This is my third poem about holidays published in 2021, and how fortunate this one comes out on Halloween and as those other holidays come creeping. This piece, “Again, Holidays” is a zuihitsu […]
Best of the Net 2021 | Kissing Dynamite Nomination
So honored to get another Best of the Net nomination (for poetry this time). Kissing Dynamite has been good to me. Check out all their nominations on their site. The poem that was nominated is “A Dyke Cowgirl Takes Herself on a Covid Taco Bell Date.” They made this part of their Featured Poet series. […]
Prelude Magazine – a Koss poem
Very honored to have this poem, which has had a hard life, in Prelude Magazine. It’s called “Slippery Gods, Not Things” and, well, you just need to click and read it. More art coming soon. Promise. And maybe I’ll even get some up to sell in the near future.
Poem | TV | Rat’s Ass Review
Happy to have a second poem published in Rat’s Ass Review on 10-27-2021. This issue is full of great writers and has a lovely cover (I’ll update this when I’m not so tired). Read it here, and, of course, here’s an album cover, although I fear I soon won’t have time to make these, half-assed […]
Asemic Art
Finished a couple pieces and am playing around with another asemic art or writing piece. The big-nosed magpie on board is finished. I posted it earlier. I’m still playing around with drawing/writing on crossword puzzles. Used a fixative, but am struggling with (albeit intrigued by) how media behaves on the cheap newsprint/manila paper. Conjures memory […]
Eat the Storms Poetry Podcast
Episode 13, Season 3. This is tomorrow (Saturday, 10-2-2021) and I’m reading (or I did a recording). I’m the only Yank. Everyone else, I believe, reads beautifully with their gorgeous UK, non-midwestern accents. I left several flaws so as not to offend the gods, although I regret it a bit seeing who else is reading. […]
Best of the Net 2021
I’m really touched today that Bending Genres nominated my Toby and Lady piece for fiction for Best of the Net 2021. It means so much coming from such a talented bunch of writers. Other BOTN nominees included Lannie Stabile for poetry, and, well, you can see the Bending Genres Twitter list here. And read “The […]
Poem | A Modern Highway Death | Spillway
This is throwback Saturday, I guess. This poem was previously published in Spillway 27.
Poem | Millais’ Ophelia
CW SUICIDE | Once a sonnet, once a not-sonnet, longer and in Entropy in a haibun, now reduced to this. Included is a photo of Millais’ Ophelia, which in its original form was too festively colored to convey the tragedy, imho. I started writing this in my head and with my camera in 2017 . […]
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