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Book Review :: Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss

Review by Jami Macarty

Through the poems in their debut chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, Koss “face[s] the world so raw and open,” endeavoring to address a traumatic past and to make “some beautiful things.” Accomplishing this entails “filling in the blanks” between the “sticky” memories of childhood “horror and experience” and taking “the liberties one / can take when” “art is conceived.”

The poet, “dancing [their] pen between” the verse line and the prose sentence, offers poems from the perspective of adulthood, looking “backwards” at the flawed adults who abused and abandoned them. Because the poems move between past and present selves, the writing is “in flux between connections and short circuits.” And, at turns, a “Cry or curse” infused with purpose: To name the “opt-out mother” and a father who “left when [they] were six”; To admit being “a victim more than once”; To grieve the death of a lover by suicide; To face the delusions of friendship and therapy. The writing also contains a “picture [of] tomorrow” in which coming to terms performs the magical act of making the trauma “go away.”

Unfortunately, it does not work that way. “There is no winning.” But trying to “be honest now” “ease[s] the pretending” and enables the poet/person to “become who they are.” Whether identifying as “craggy boxing bitch,” lesbian, “one-speed train,” or “withdrawn and frequently tired,” the poet is “a bit at odds with” self but is determined to “just feel what [they] feel.” To a survivor of abuse and oppression, the felt expression is the ultimate liberty and triumph.

These poems are “proof of… dysfunction,” but they also prove the function of art as a “salve” for what we “see / and don’t.” Whether engaging with self through trauma, queerness, psychology, or art, Koss approaches the page “with an open sense of wonder.”


Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss. Diode Editions, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.