Romance or the End

“This book takes me right back to the Carnage Years-yours, too-sacrificed to love. If only I, you, had possessed Elaine Kahn’s wisdom and wit. These poems are lacerating, coy, bloody, and so true I wanted to memorize lines from them.” -Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers Romance or The End takes up the tools of romantic narrative in order to perform the rupture between self and story that occurs at the onset of trauma. Using known and pathologized literary arcs, Elaine Kahn unspools the fundamental instability of truth, love, and language to create an experiential portrait of narrative’s power to both disfigure and restore. ROMANCE or THE END This is a book about love. And it is a book about lies. Love can be a lie, but it is also always true. This is a book about truth. This is a book about story. There is no such thing as a true story and so there are no stories in this book. Without a story, there is separation. This is a book about separation. Everything is a story. Even the truth. There is nothing truer in this world than the lie of love. " —Andrew King, University Book Store (Seattle, WA) "This is slash-and-burn poetry, with lines as economical as a knife wound. Elaine Kahn holds nothing back but never wastes a word, allowing seething eroticism to creep through the white spaces on the page." —Grace Harper, Mac's Backs (Cleveland Heights, OH) "Kahn’s latest collection of poems are a cutting exploration of the themes of love, relationship, and what happens when those things implode. Every poem works in tandem to form a fractured narrative as Kahn plumbs the depths of what romance is, and if such a thing is even possible without crippling compromise. Confrontational, sometimes bleak, and always incisive, Romance or The End is a multifaceted collection that will stick with me for a long while." —Caleb Masters, Bookmarks (Winston-Salem, NC) "You will get to the end of Romance or The End in an hour, every sparse word surrounded by a vast space on the page imbibed with a thrilling confidence in every word’s sting, and you’ll turn it back to the beginning to see the vastness transform into something like healing, and it’ll take days, weeks, months, lifetimes to tease it all out." —Luis Correa, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)