Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse

Dylan Krieger

American's tend to sentimentalize the body. Dylan Krieger does not.
— Stephen Kuusisto, author of Letters to Borges

Krieger has created an iridescent tomb of the body… I will be returning to these poems again and again.
— Elle Nash, author of Animals Eat Each Other

“What doesn’t kill you…will eventually,” says Dylan Krieger in Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse—a poetry collection inspired by living with chronic pain. The nightmare of being in a body is a shared nightmare only until pain becomes distinctive, eccentric. “You can’t kill what I have without taking down the whole has-been animal with it.” What doesn’t kill you, I might add, only makes you want to die more. “We apologize for having bodies long before they bite back.” Existence, at best, is palliative care. The only cure for the human condition is death. “The death drive survives…Prognosis: endless.” Though pain (and suffering) may estrange us from each other, they connect us to ourselves, and in self-intimacy, even without healing, even without hope, there is grace.
—Kim Vodicka, author of The Elvis Machine & Dear Ted

Surgically deep. Sonorous architecture. Dylan Krieger runs from nothing.
— Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich, author of Ruthless Little Things

Stylistically, Krieger’s poetry has a rhythm like a heartbeat. Philosophically, it’s an expression of the embodied consciousness. Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse isn’t the work of an abstract mind trapped in a body; it’s the conscious body on fire and hopelessly embedded in the world.
— Charlene Elsby, author of Hexis and Affect

In its dense cycles of assonance and internal rhyme, Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse endeavors to mirror the frustrating throb of chronic pain’s flare-ups and remissions, and the corresponding cycles of despair and hope that punctuate their rhythm. 

Betraying a personal obsession with the grotesque—volatile and disturbing physical transformations that reveal the body’s radical permeability and capacity for de- and re-formation—these poems explore the challenges posed by seeking treatment for misunderstood or “invisible” conditions, self-medicating, communicating physical needs and limitations in relationships, empathizing versus competing with others in pain, romanticizing silent suffering, and the cruelty of religious solicitations based on divine healing.

Soft Focus Slaughterhouse is a collection of new poems by Dylan Krieger published in The Collapsar, jubilat, Nine Mile Magazine and West Trade Review.

About the author

Dylan Krieger is writing the apocalypse in real time in south Louisiana. She earned her BA in English and philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and her MFA in creative writing from LSU. Her first book, Giving Godhead (Delete, 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, 2018), No Ledge Left to Love (Ping Pong, 2018), The Mother Wart (Vegetarian Alcoholic, 2019), Metamortuary (Nine Mile, 2020), and, of course, Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse (11:11, forthcoming). Find her at www.dylankrieger.com

Twitter: @dwkrieger

Instagram: @dylanwk

ISBN: 9781948687515 (ebook)

ISBN: 9781948687263 (paperback)