Poet Republik: Dylan Krieger/No Ledge Left to Love

excerpts from, No Ledge Left to Love by Dylan Krieger:

the floating man

of course a man. of course a pandered animal. of course only a man can simply snowdrift with this much import.
of course born of a rainstorm. of course aimless. of course the vanishing point of valhalla enormous.
of course on a brain-by-brain basis. of course strangers. of course gravity drains him straight into the grave hole.
of course 10-story cat call. of course not floating but falling. of course we will all die if we keep falling according to law.
of course the law stating his emaciated immortality overlooks his nonexistence from time immemorial until today, when severed from a world trade center window frame he made the skyscrape maker’s same mistake of faking ownership over eternity, as if the self-awareness to drop a penny alongside his body might make him as sturdy when faced with the pavement’s flat shame—

swampman

again with the man. again with the why me? chromosome. again with the over-doubling of watery electrocharged molecules. one day, underground, vomiting up what i can’t understand. one day, below sea level, where i live now, prying my prosthetic limbs out of an alligator’s mouth. one day, to fellate a deity, i swallowed his whole lightning strike in one fell blow. one day, whether man or clone, i thought i would be better off this way, hiking my happy ass toward the primordial floodgates unfurled. pretty predictable the fickle godhead’s prick would kill me. pretty predictable he’d recreate me just to say he could do it, redoubled, again. again with the painfully postmodern thought, what makes a post-traumatic is an ought? again with the clone coming down from the clouds, the only is that matters now. again with the perennial recognition of wife and three children he has no reason to miss. again with the season for body-snatching ids and egos, all prototypes stripped, left for dead in the sand end to end

cerebellum transplant

it started with a taste for brains—the way i translate the platonic grace of whatever monster saves us from the cave. envision him—of course a him—all wrinkled noodly and gray. no way the ache of the primate could fornicate with anything as gamey and curled. so i say, how about a whole new ribbon-cutting? how about a pearly new glass house in which to play? and then i slice behind your ear while you are still awake. no longer callow and rash in my somnambulating little cloud of famished antics, i shift my adult vision to bigger rigors and precision, delivered scalpel-quick—this time, my snap decision is to snap your spine, but not before snatching your self-stem, serenading someone else’s brainpan to accept your pesky cache of past mistakes, curating a careful patchwork of frankensteinian feelers filling their new home with inexplicable visions of warships stripped to the pinions, violins riddled with insects, spinning bottles of toxins, and—suddenly—oceanic lack ad infinitum
Ping-Pong Free Press and the Henry Miller Memorial Library are proud to announce the publication of No Ledge Left to Love by Dylan Krieger. Winner of the Ping-Pong Free Press poetry prize 2018. Award-winning poet and translator Brian Henry served as judge.
Praise for Dylan Krieger:
New York Times Review of books: “Dylan Krieger’s “Giving Godhead” will be the best collection of poetry to appear in English in 2017.” We here at Ping-Pong Free Press believe No Ledge Left to Love will be the best of 2018.
Dylan Krieger’s No Ledge Left to Love is a book of delirious delights. Cutting across time(s) to fashion a visceral, necessarily disturbing tour of thought experiments and philosophical constructs, Krieger writes with an audacious yet sobering energy. Rife with vertiginous wordplay and transgressive intent, these are poems “for the savagesphere or wherever next we might emerge after a thousand years cocooning in our eyelashes and sticky furs.”
—Brian Henry, contest judge, author of 10 books of poetry, most recently, Static and Snow.
“In No Ledge Left To Love, Dylan Krieger deftly ricochets between the philosophical and the grotesque through powerfully direct prose poems that retain hypnotically lyric lines. Smart, visceral, and relentless, Krieger breathlessly hacks at the bloated body of western reason and—through a parade of mouths, derelict deities, and rivers of goo—keeps one hand extended, inviting us to the dance.”
–Janaka Stucky’s poetry collection, The Truth Is We Are Perfect, was chosen by Jack White’s newly-fledged imprint, Third Man books as their inaugural title.
About Dylan Krieger:

Regarding the creation of her book Krieger writes, “As the titles in its contents suggest, “no ledge left to love” is a poetry project that reimagines and challenges the frameworks of Western philosophical thought experiments, especially with respect to gender categories, moral certitude, and diachronic identity. Each poem focuses on a different thought experiment in analytical philosophy, from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Nagel’s spider in a urinal. Recognizing that Western philosophy—like most all academic disciplines—has been largely dominated by wealthy straight white men, “no ledge” attempts to dismantle the reductive binaries and disembodied logic of the analytical philosophical vernacular, emphasizing instead the robust physicality and potent mutability of the bodies required to convey its lofty ideas.”
Dylan Krieger is an automatic meaning generator in south Louisiana, where she lives with a feline reincarnation of Catherine the Great and sunlights as a trade mag editor. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Louisiana State University, where she won the Billy Maich Academy of American Poets Prize and the Robert Penn Warren Award, respectively. Her debut poetry collection, Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017), was dubbed “the best collection of poetry to appear in English in 2017” by the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of dreamland trash (Saint Julian Press, 2018) . Find her at www.dylankrieger.com.
About No Ledge Left to Love:
Dylan Krieger is a philosopher, there is no doubt about that, and with a typical philosopher’s bravado she takes an analytical exacto knife to the problems of our world. What does she find? Crony Capitalism and systems of oppression and dominance instituted by heterosexual upper class white males in order to keep their hegemony on power.
She speaks to us as the voice of the zeitgeist of America, a Greek chorus we have ignored for far too long. And the Greek influence is subtly present, almost undetectable. The metric and rhyme scheme she makes use of will remind readers of the epic poems of old.
And this is a new epic poem– not only because it makes deft use of rhyme and pattern–see quantum immortality–but because it traces the heroine’s journey from darkness into an even greater darkness. The Odyssey is the story of the last hero from the Greek age of Heroes, No Ledge Left to Love is the story of humanity’s last age. Imbued with philosophical concepts and wit–Krieger’s tour de force is a trumpet call, but only for those who will hearken to it. Now the question is, will you?
River Atwood Tabor author of Tumbleweed Migration and Haunted by Waters.
Pungent. Delightful. Tickles the eardrums and leaves the imagination and senses alert and gaping, wide open and wanting more! Brilliant on a level of Emily Dickinson. Dylan dares to marry senses with prose… poetry with transdermal transparency. She doesn’t even blink–challenging readers to think for themselves, and to think ABOUT their pitiful humanity while at the time casting no shame. BRAVO!!! Give us more!!! I felt like a kid at a candy shop. Delicious to read. Excellent! Like a Roman arena we stand and applaud feeling more alive than we did before. -Sara Bassler
Thank-you to all who helped us create this 8 month labor of love: cover artist, Judith Supine; art editor, Rachel Abrams; book layout, Jehan Valera; graphic designer, Michael Willis
Henry Miller Library blog: here
Questions about ordering: pingpongfreepress@gmail.com