Holy Land

"Rauan Klassnik’s Holy Land is not a book for the faint of heart. His poems—dreamlike fables that conflate the domestic and quotidian with the dangerous and the perverse—are bathed in tears and blood: a trip to the bank becomes a journey to Auschwitz; bullets and gore find equivalence in rivers, birds and lush grass. In Klassnik’s startling vision, 'the world knows what you want, and it knows what you need. It brings you bodies. And it brings you a gun.'” —Gary Young
"These poems might have been written by a Catullus with a serious Ecstasy addiction, or by some genetic cross-wiring of Henry Miller and Jean Follain. Ferocious in his humor and anguished intelligence and bad attitudes, Klassnik means everything he says. The wild existence of these poems is a strange, precarious pleasure." —David Rivard
"Holy Land is a primer stolen from a surreal primary school. These hypnotic prose poems are stark anatomies of stark anatomies. Imperatives that rape reverie. Instead of introducing us to new words, they make the old words new again. They might have been ripped from the dream journals of Dick and Jane. Tongues are retooled. Ears calibrated. Eyes pried open. Even the periods sing. Read in earnest and for the first time." —Michael Martone