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Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect – Now Shipping!

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect

by Koss

Diode Contest Winner and Lambda Literary Lammy Lesbian Poetry Finalist (2025)
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.

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Blog Posts

screenshot with cartoon face with striped shirt and glasses of a published poem in action spectacle with aqua and pink colors

Action, Spectacle Winter ’23 Issue

Grateful to Adam Day and the guest editors of the literary journal, Action Spectacle, including Lyn Hejinian, Timothy Liu, Kevin Prufer, Caitlin Horrocks, Daniel Tiffany, Frank Bill, Graham Foust, Meera Ganapathi, Rob McLennan, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Kristin Bock, Catina Bacote, Clifford Thompson, Dorothee Elmiger, Wayne Miller for publishing my snarky dating poem in the […]

Pink cartoon nerdy person with glasses and striped t-shirt with book title also in pink.

Diode Substack Newsletter | Koss Book Update

I haven’t really talked online about what my forthcoming chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, is about, but you can read the book description on Diode Editions’ Substack which also showcases my “Therapist Sez” poem, first published in diode poetry and winner of the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest. Know you can also sign up […]

eyeglasses with round excerpt images of a swamp and a tornado on a beige background with promotional text for the publication

Sage Cigarettes Magazine | Sketches & Erasures

Honored to have work included in Sage Cigarettes Magazine just before they change their format. Featured are two sketches, one of a tornado and one of a marsh, and a diptych made from two Wuthering Heights erasure/collages, previously published in Permafrost. It’s lovely to see this online as well as in print as they’re sure […]

querencia press text over black, green and purple galaxy with pub day text for the winter 2024 anthology.

Querencia Winter 2024 Anthology | Poems

Today is pub day for the Querencia Press Winter 2024 Anthology. I’m honored to have three poems published. They’re important poems to me, “Dead People Don’t Dream Hamburgers,” “Conversions: I Appeared in Your Suicide Dream,” and “Max, Carrie’s Mother, [No Wonder].” These were published (in order) in Eunoia, Spillway, and Anti-Heroin Chic but I’m thrilled […]