The Dead Wrestler Elegies Championship Edition

<p>W. Todd Kaneko's <em>The Dead Wrestler Elegies </em>is some kind of miracle. There's nothing else like it. The book succeeds as guilty pleasure and love affair tribute and indictment myth-making and intervention a chronicle of obsession and disappointment and a meditation on everything from gender politics to the points at which we all eventually submit. More than a pack of wild horses more than spray-tanned human biceps confusing themselves for pythons more than any kind of mania really this book is gonna run wild on you. <strong>-MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK</strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>When the lights in the arenas go out the poems and Kaneko's stunning visual work in <em>The Dead Wrestler Elegies </em>honor both these wrestlers and an era. Through Todd Kaneko's fierce but tender elegies we come to understand that the gods are mortal after all. <strong style=color: rgba(0 255 255 1)>-OLIVER DE LA PAZ</strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Sheened with baby oil and juice these powerful poems explore the constructed and painful nature of masculinity's glory and gory days where the body's currency is a site of both invincibility and vulnerability transcendence and decay Kaneko's lines moonsaulting a muscular parabola between cartoon and icon kitsch and myth the timeless cage match between ecstasy and grief. <strong style=color: rgba(0 255 255 1)>-LEE ANN RORIPAUGH</strong></p><p><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>These larger-than-life portraits are more deeply elegies for a lost family: for a departed mother for a father who shared his love of wrestling through old VHS tapes. W. Todd Kaneko makes the wrestling ring an allegory of childhood of masculinity desire and loss a landscape of fantasy and dreams. <strong style=color: rgba(0 255 255 1)>-TIMOTHY YU</strong></p><p><br></p>